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Moving Day

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2024| 6 Comments »

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[with 4 poems from I-70 Review]
 . 
Bears Active in This Area
 . 
++++ warning sign in my mountain cabin
 . 
This time, others have seen you,
treading circles on the gravel drive,
shouldering through grapevine tangles.
The possibility of you was always here,
in the night-mouth of the cave that gapes
below my porch, in dark boulders
hulking along the trail.
 . 
Your presence countermands silence –
I chatter and sing as I walk the open road,
snatches of carols, toddler songs –
and shy from the path that meanders
to a sunlit filed strewn with windfalls
from long-neglected trees. I imagine
you keeping pace, just out of sight,
your huffs mocking my jabber,
your heavy steps a counterpoint
as I scurry past thickets, scan uneasily
the curving trail ahead, intruder
in a world that was never mine,
though you are the first to insist
that I acknowledge it.
 . 
Rebecca Baggett
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What would a toddler remember about moving away? The apartment in Niagara Falls is a dream of stairwells and windows and darkness outside; the new house in the new subdivision with no grass at all is a neighbor’s dog named Bishy. Or was Bishy the neighbor’s toddler I played with?
 . 
I am four when we move away again, from New York to Tennessee, and I remember plenty about Marion Road: Bob and I watching Little Rascals until Mom declares, “You’re going to turn into rascals!”; our little sun room Aunt Ellen fitted up as a bed-sit while she attended Memphis State, and we kids hiding giggling under her covers until she came home each afternoon; the neighbor boy who introduced us to the word butt and we thought we were the first humans ever to utter something so outrageous. Memories of the neighborhood, yes, but memories of moving there? Packing and unpacking? Worrying that Puppy would get lost in the shuffle or that somehow Mom wouldn’t be there when we arrived? None of that remains.
 . 
Our family makes one more inconsequential move just blocks away when I am six, but then when I’m twelve the Big Away arrives. Up until this what a tranquil 1950’s childhood: I walk to Colonial Elementary every morning with my friends and play with the same friends every evening until the streetlights come on. Serene. Now I’m midway through sixth grade, still coasting, when the bomb drops. Did I protest when Dad announced in January we were leaving Memphis to move to Delaware? Maybe, I don’t recall; that memory is muddy, but this one is sharp as crystal – I walk into class in my new school and my new classmates all turn to look. My clothes aren’t right, my accent is a joke (literally – within about sixty seconds I will have the nickname “Memphis,” which sticks), and I have a different teacher for every subject. And then in just six more months we will move to Michigan. Just over a year beyond that, two months into eighth grade, we move to Ohio.
 . 
So, my friend, is it any wonder that some sixty years later I have trouble remembering your name until the fourth or fifth time we meet? That as we converse in a group you notice me smiling and nodding and slowly drifting off into space? That I would rather write this blog into the wee hours than drop by your house for coffee? I want to be a good friend to you, and in fact I like you and this hug from me to you is real, but ah, it’s risky. There’s always that possibility, without warning and with no desire on my part, that someday soon I might be moving away.
 . 
❦
 . 
It never occurred to me to wonder how Dad felt about all those moves. The moving was his fault, after all, necessary for his promotions and advancement with DuPont, for whom he worked all his life. I can scarcely imagine the million details he had to sift through to put his family into boxes and take them out again hundreds of miles away. I’m not surprised that as I clean out his house I find drawers full of lists on yellow pads, on the backs of junk mail, on bills and receipts. Half the time when he calls me, it’s to add something to the shopping list. And then there are still those boxes in the attic labeled Allied Van Lines.
 . 
But what about the rest of us? Did Dad wake sweating in the middle of the night worrying how moving away would affect his family? Just one time he blinked: after I was married and gone but Mary Ellen was still at home, a junior in high school, Dad turned down a promotion so she could graduate with her class. A sacrifice that stalled his career for a decade.
 . 
Tomorrow is Dad’s last moving day. Since Mom died in July, Dad has agreed to move closer to us. For a week I’ve ferried boxes and duffels, checked off my lists and then made new ones, and tomorrow after lunch I’ll drive Dad to a nursing center just two miles from our house. He says he’s willing to move as long as the food is good (it is). We’ve hung portraits of the grandkids, pastels by Mom. His Duke pillow is on the recliner and his new Duke banner hangs on the door of room 507 to welcome him. God knows I’ve been waking in the middle of the night sweating the million details. Let us hope that after 98 years of moving, Dad will discover in this new and final home a place to rest.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Porta Nigra   *
 . 
++++ Trier, Germany
 . 
The breath of sun and rain
only darkens on my face.
The cat-claws of millennia,
the graffiti of tourists,
fade into my walls.
 . 
I, who guarded this city so long,
sit truncated now.
My frieze the sweaty flesh
of lovers on cool bare stones.
 . 
Catch me in another thousand years,
your eyes as hard and dark as mine.
See if these holes will match
the mysteries of death
and flesh on blackened stone.
 . 
Bradley Strahan
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
 . 
* a gate in the remaining piece of Trier’s old Roman wall
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The 2024 issue of I-70 Review arrived in last week’s post. Besides many wonderful voices new to me, I discovered within its pages several old friends who’ve agreed to let me reprint their poems.
 . 
I-70 Review, Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond is based in Kansas, USA, but publishes poetry, short fiction, and art from around the world. They also sponsor the annual Bill Hickok Humor award for poetry.
 . 
Submission guidelines HERE
Purchase a copy HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Messenger in Early November
 . 
++++++ – in memory of Jay Klokker
 . 
Driving past Agate Bay, I catch a glimpse
of this deer in a splotch of sun and shadow –
the brown-tail’s flanks on the edge of the road
in yellow leaves, thin branches. Las May
after your death, a bear cub loped beside my car
like a lost Labrador, seemed to disappear
under my front bumper. Slamming on the brakes,
I felt no thud, heard nothing. Amazing, the cub
as if uninjured, clambered up the ditch-bank.
Only later, after your memorial, did I reread
your last poems, that black bear nosing
at your sleeping bag in the camp site
in Arizona; recalled marmots whistling
in the pillow basalt near Mt. Baker; the grouse
thumping its tail near our driveway,
feasting on red hawthorn berries.
You noticed. I cannot believe you said no
to another go-round on the cancer wish machine,
you called it, completed your book First Stars.
On you last hike, you raced downhill
in your wheelchair, shouting. You must
be in these sun spots, mottled shadows.
Too excellent a camouflage, my friend –
thin, flickering branches, a few gold leaves,
before all the color goes away.
 . 
Richard Widerkehr
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
this poem will appear in Richard’s new book, Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Press)
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Other
 . 
Last night coyotes laughed
at the neighbor’s bulked-up lab restrained
behind his chain-link, his fearful bark,
their yips of liberty and mild derision;
 . 
are coyotes such demons, or just particular
about whom they allow to know them?
Or are they perhaps spirits of the other,
avatar of all we hominids in our marrow
 . 
know to fear? How to live beside that feeling?
Afraid of attack I stab; afraid of pain I cause it.
 . 
In the woods before daylight willingly lost,
soft tread, a twist in the trail then face to face –
perhaps she and I look into each other’s eyes
for two seconds, perhaps the rest
 . 
of my life; coyote impassive,
considerate, measures our distance,
our closeness, then softly pivots
and pads away, prudent, fearless,
 . 
willing to allow the two of us
to share the universe.
 . 
Bill Griffin
from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
Doughton Park Tree 2020-09-08b

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Spontaneous

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2024| 19 Comments »

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 . 
[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]
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Heaven
 . 
You wake in a sun drenched room
with knotty pine walls and open windows,
 . 
white curtains billowing. The warm,
salt-scented breeze carries
 . 
the sound of waves, the laughter of children,
the cry of gulls. Somewhere
 . 
inside the house, bacon sizzles in a pan,
coffee drips into a pot – and there are voices,
 . 
familiar voices – your grandmother,
your brother, your best friend. It’s been
 . 
so long since you have seen them.
So you sit up in bed, stretch your strong,
 . 
supple limbs. There is no pain,
no stiff shoulders and creaky joints.
 . 
There is no weight of sorrow or regret –
only a kind of soaring joy that lifts
 . 
and circles inside you like a kit.
And when you move across the floor,
 . 
it feels like floating, as if your body is made
of light and air – but solid when
 . 
they reach for you, when their arms
open wide and you walk in.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Spontaneous combustion – when a ten-year old reads about such a thing of course he’s going to think, Fire! Cool! My friends and I weren’t allowed to play with matches (although we could have swiped some from our Dads, all smokers, and we certainly smoldered plenty of stuff with our magnifying glasses during the Memphis summers). So fire blossoming up all on its own?! We scrounged an old t-shirt, sopped up some oil that had leaked from a lawn mower, and stashed the rags in a dark corner of Mike Slattery’s garage. And waited. I moved away from that neighborhood two years later and I have yet to hear that the garage burned down.
 . 
I have a friend with a gift. She can wake up in the morning first thing and fire off to the rest of us in the writers group what has just flowed from her pen into her journal. “Can” as in willing and able and unrestrained. Ten lines or twenty, she shares something always fresh, light breaking, a window open to her soul. Meanwhile, I’ve re-written this paragraph three times in my head, twice on paper, and six times on the screen. I need the t-shirt my brother-in-law Skip wears: “Hold on a minute while I overthink this.”
 . 
Now I’m stashing stuff in the car for this morning’s drive to Winston, errands to be accomplished for Dad: laptop, check; Power of Attorney docs, check. Wait, I was thinking of taking Dad some flowers from the front yard today. No, too tired. Next time.
 . 
And when might that next time arrive? Snipping zinnias, marigolds, anise hyssop, coaxing their stems into an old bread bag with a wet paper towel in the bottom, fitting the fresh bouquet into my cup holder – oh, my! Flames of purple and scarlet and bright orange, scent of mint and musky asters – pulling out of the driveway, how spontaneously I combust!
 .
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Sunflowers
 . 
In our well-manicured yard
where a clover can’t show its face
or risk dire consequences, a row
of sunflowers sprang up by the bird
feeder, claiming the kitchen
 . 
window for their own. Such thick
stalks and heavy flowers belong
in children’s stories, where
gardens bloom in shapes
and colors seldom imagined
 . 
and mushroom grow as big
as houses. With great dark eyes
surrounded by yellow lashes,
they follow the sun on its daily
journey – a bevy of bold young
 . 
girls in love with the same boy.
Dazzling beauties all, showing
up our prim blades of grass
and trimmed bushes like hula
dancers in a room full of pilgrims.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
clouds cast shadows across the ground like whales swimming through clear water
a bevy of bold young girls in love with the same boy [sunflowers]
the yellow-haired girl whose hands rested in her lap like fresh-picked lilies
her fingers dancing over tubes of lipstick as if they were piano keys, and she, learning a new song
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson’s poems delight in the perfect image, the lance of daylight that makes shadows radiant. She populates her lines with characters from every neighborhood and every family, her own included, and she reveals their secrets, unknown sometimes even to them, but she does it with language so airy and effortless that I imagine her raising her pen like a lightning rod and drawing to it from heaven a bright spark of inspiration. Spontaneous, emerging fully formed from the heart. The rest of us bail the bilge as we adhere to the adage, “Writing is re-writing,” while Terri is skipping stones across the water.
 . 
❦
 . 
In the Palms of Angels by Terri Kirby Erickson is available at PRESS 53
More by Terri at Verse & Image HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Grandmother’s Lamp
 . 
In the quiet stillness of a snowy evening,
the earth is white as angel wings and the sky
purple as lilacs pressed against the window
 . 
pane. The soft glow of Grandmother’s lamp,
with its yellowed shade and pattern
of porcelain roses, falls on the antique tabletop
 . 
and the picture of my mother, the ballet
dancer, posing. From the street,
it’s just another lamp in a long row of lighted
 . 
windows, but to me, it is the sweet comfort
of my grandmother’s face, bent earnestly
over her needle point, or patiently putting together
 . 
another scrapbook of memories, pasted just so
on the page. It is her quiet certainty that this, too,
shall pass, that God hears our prayers,
 . 
and the heaven is not the stuff of fairy tales
woven to quiet our fears, but as real as the lamp
she left for me, to light my way there.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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Tether

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on August 23, 2024| 8 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Linda Annas Ferguson]
 . 
Family Reunion
 . 
I have to reach deeper each year
for all that is stored
in the pockets of this house.
 . 
This is a day we have to slow ourselves
to feel what time has deepened.
My own body, half-remembering,
lingers in a doorway.
 . 
Children pick plums
off the near-bare tree
outside the kitchen.
The day dissolves into hungry reaching.
 . 
Mother watches at the window
drinking in the one life she must live,
rolls lint in her apron packet,
suffers love in the smallest of things.
 . 
She is tired now, a fragile cup
to be hummed into.
I can hear a familiar lullaby
in her good-byes.
 . 
We leave all at once
like awkward adolescents
avoiding an intimacy,
Mother’s hands folded on her lap
to fill its emptiness.
 . 
We are already
thinking of tomorrow
as if the past
is just a house we visit.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
“Hey, Bert, how about if your Mom rides with Aunt Jodi?” We are visiting Linda’s youngest sister in West Virginia, first time since Bert was a toddler. This afternoon he’s been running, toad-hopping, climbing, all out exploring the old house and the new one going up beside it. If there is a tether between him and his mother, it has not been visible. Now we’re preparing to drive to nearby Babcock State Park, but we won’t all fit in one car and there’s just the one car seat, in ours. So how about it, Bert? “No! I want Mommy to ride with me.”
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Perihelion for comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is just weeks away, mid-September 2024; what will happen as it reaches its orbit’s closest point to the sun? How many thousands or millions of years has it been since it last passed this way? It is so small and it will grow so hot, nearer to the sun than Mercury – will it crack like cold glass filled with hot tea? Or will it hold together, swing wide, its long tail swishing across its face to become anti-tail, a leash preceding the body back into darkness and cold? Those who follow the comet don’t see its tether of gravity but they measure its pull and calculate its path, a once in a million years opportunity.
 . 
I haven’t lived in the same home with my mother since June 15, 1974. Even before that there was the year in West Berlin as an exchange student and the three years away at college. Then came fifty years with just a week here and a week there under the same roof, vacations, taking for granted that Mom would still scramble my eggs and make red-eye gravy every morning. And then these last few weeks. Sitting beside her on the couch helping her fill out the Jumble on the comics page. (Me helping her? Inconceivable.) Trying to convince her to eat one more bite of pudding. Bringing fresh flowers from my front yard which never fail to raise a smile. I’ve been saying little goodbyes for months (be honest, for years) and convinced myself I’d laid aside the tether with gentleness and with calm. Perhaps, to be even more honest, I’m only now really feeling its strength.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mother’s Funeral, the Family Viewing
 . 
You linger in the room, a dark silk.
We sit around in massive silence,
then pleasant and uneasy,
discuss how you willed yourself to die.
 . 
We all saw you going,
never waved to you to come back,
as if we did not think
you would really go.
 . 
Your body lies life-like
as if dreaming motion.
I feel my own aging,
my hands cold like yours.
 . 
I rinse my lips after kissing your cheek
as if death will wash off. I can still see
your closed eyes, your mouth
poised as if forming a thought.
 . 
I turn around, expect you
to be standing in the doorway.
you are not there.
You have finally stopped leaving.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I learned this in grade school: the roots we can’t see are as big as the branches we can. What tethers the tree to earth and nourishes it is so easy to take for granted. Reading Bird Missing from One Shoulder by Linda Annas Ferguson, I imagine her writing these poems twenty years ago and revealing, first for herself and today for me, much that must have once been hidden. Much that must have been difficult to see as it was happening and difficult to return to later. But Linda’s poetry takes nothing for granted. The connections, the ties, the necessary tug and pull of the heart, all are made beautifully plain.
 . 
What is the soil that covers these roots of ours and conceals what should be so plain that we learn it in grade school? Time, of course, saps memory. Yesterday I asked my father about something my mother had told me that I wanted to recall, but it was beyond him. More than time, though, are the curtains we ourselves hang or with which we allow the dailyness of life to cloak us. Some memories are painful; I hold them at bay until the veil frays at 4 AM and they intrude. Some I push aside and promise to deal with later. And some connections, even when truly vital, can’t compete with worrying about the bills and getting to an appointment on time.
 . 
Enter poetry. To write, one must pause at least long enough to pick up a pen. Not that a placid morning free of responsibilities is required – I confess I keep a blank page on a clipboard in the passenger seat beside me and start most of my poems at 65 MPH. The “pause,” though, is metaphor for willingness – to open oneself; to glimpse the unseen; to accept that there are tethers that weave through all of our moments and all of our relationships. Sweet, strong, nourishing roots that hold us down, that hold us up. Love, pervasive and powerful as gravity, swings me every day around the sun.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mama’s Closet
 . 
I can feel her here under the stairs
where she stores pieces of herself
on shelves in yellowed shoe boxes,
 . 
a report card from fifth grade,
her mother’s signature in faded pencil
on the bottom line.
 . 
A group picture, women workers
outside on the gray grass of the cotton mill,
its tall brick wall the only background,
 . 
her fourteen-year-old face
lost in frowns
and fixed smiles of the front row.
 . 
Another photo at twenty, a Saturday afternoon
on a steel bridge, Daddy’s arm
around her shoulder posed for a future.
 . 
Three purses on ten-penny nails, full of notes,
mementos, money she hides for a child’s needs,
a winter coat, a Sunday dress.
 . 
I can feel her here, under the stairs,
every corner collecting her plain
unperfumed warmth,
 . 
every photo, saving the girls she wants
to remember, every small portion of paper
a folded page of herself.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

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