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Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Impermanence

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , on July 21, 2023| 11 Comments »

 . 
[with poems by John Brehm (and A. R. Ammons)]
 . 
Songbird
 . 
Even thou I have not seen it,
I know how it could be,
how when the skylark flees
from a falcon’s quick pursuit
 . 
it will turn sometimes and begin
to sing, as if to say, “Being
eaten by a falcon is the last thing
in the world I’m worried about.
 . 
You cannot catch me, Tra, la, la.
I’ve got breath enough to waste
on a song like this, which you
may as well enjoy before I vanish
 . 
into air.” And the raptor know
it’s true, knows that anyone
foolish enough to sing in such
a circumstance is quite beyond
 . 
ever being caught, and that for all
his hunger he’ll be given just
a song, tumbling through the air,
as the body he desires disappears.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For the past two months I am an ant whose dead moth has been lofted by an unseen hand. Go this way, go that way, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Tornado, no power for three days, driveway blocked, hundreds of trees down in our neighbors’ yards and a dozen in ours. Check the roof with the adjuster, walk the property with the arborist, wake up and go to bed with chainsaws and cherry pickers. We’ve lived in this house for forty years and the oak, hickory, maple, tuliptrees where already mature when we moved in. We’ve been used to one deep green engulfing embrace all summer, every summer. Now everything has changed.
 . 
I took a “break” this month, as I’d promised them last winter, to serve as primary caregiver for my nonagenarian parents while they spent a fond bit of time at their beach house. The first thing I noticed when Linda pulled back into our driveway the evening I returned was . . . WEEDS! Holy cow, fallow earth so used to deep shade must have been preserving this seed cache forever! Pokeberry, pilewort, hawkweed, fleabane, despised mimosa, uncounted escaped purple basil a friend gave me three decades ago – they’re everywhere and BIG! The invasion is overwhelming. As if life weren’t overwhelming me already.
 . 
After supper I walked out front to check the progress of a volunteer pumpkin that has grown up into the azaleas. Maybe I shouldn’t have instructed Linda to water it twice a week. The black-eyed susans have finally completed their conquest of our borders. Plants – they do enjoy sunlight. I stop in the middle of the roadway and turn to look back at our property. Is this the first time in two months I’ve looked up? Above and behind and around our house – sky. Empty sky. How long before the remaining trees fill it? How long until I lose this dread feeling that nothing will ever be the same?
 . 
❦
 . 
A number of years ago I read an anthology that I often return to: The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, edited by John Brehm. When life is overwhelming and being in the moment is about to set my last few hairs on fire, I open to any page. There is no judgement here. No finger-wagging that I am not doing “enough.” There are no spiritual prescriptions or required agendas. I know as I read I’ll simply be sharing with a companion, another human being. It’s nice to be just one human among other humans, from Basho to Billy Collins and Saigyō to Shakespeare, friends all. I am an ant who feels no anxiety for his moth.
 . 
Then one day my issue of The Sun arrived I discovered these two by John Brehm himself:
 . 
Wanting Not Wanting
 . 
I wish I didn’t
want things
 . 
to be other
than they are
 . 
but wanting
to be some-
 . 
one who
doesn’t want
 . 
things to be
other than
 . 
they are is
just another
 . 
way of wanting
things to be
 . 
other than
they are —
 . 
and I don’t
want that.
 . 
 . 
On Turning Sixty-Four
 . 
The slowing down
is speeding up.
 . 
John Brehm
from The Sun. Chapel Hill NC, June, 2020
 . 
Oh my. Ohhhh my. I photocopied the page and kept it taped the wall beside my desk for months. Eventually I said to myself, “This John Brehm fellow has gotten into my head. I’d better get to know him better now that we’re friends.” I ordered Sea of Faith and was immediately floored (or exalted?) by the inscription: To the memory of A. R. Ammons ( 1926-2001). Oh my, here’s my other perennial poetry inspiration. So to come full circle I share with you another poem which I resemble intimately, this Ammons poem that appears in The Poetry of Impermanence.
 . 
Old Geezer
 . 
The quickest
way
to change
 . 
the
world is
to
 . 
like it
the
way it
 . 
is.
 . 
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)
from The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. Wisdom Publications, Somerville MA, © 2017
 . 
 . . 
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Blasted Tree
 . 
Of all of them along the path
that curved for twenty miles
through thickest forest, it was
the blasted tree I loved
best. Among thousands of firs
risen beyond the eye’s reach,
among colossal cedars
with their bark soft
as humid earth, among
groves of slender birches that
filtered winds cast across
these hills from Asia,
among even the hemlocks, gripped
in rocky ground and holding
two hundred years of darkness
in each leaf, among all these
it was the blasted oak
I loved best. Just as the path
turns and ascends, it stands
in a little clearing, like
a signpost to the walker
who would go on farther, as if
to say there is some price
to be paid, or only
the stricken may enter here.
Perhaps because it stood alone
the lightning bolt found its way
to it, the branch that would
have arched above and shaded
the meadow, torn off in a
brilliant flash of the sky’s
violence, ripped cleanly
from the trunk, though you can
still see the black scorched
teeth of the wood where
it broke and let
the limb fall to earth.
It must have been a ghastly
sound and a sight heart-
breaking to behold, the perfect
symmetry and elegance gone
in an instant. And now
a piece of sky no one would
ever have seen from here
come clearly into view,
empty and lue and cleaner
than before because of
the branch’s vivid absence.
I loved the damaged grandeur
of that tree, how it bore
its loss with such composure,
and kept on growing, lop-
sided, irreparable, beautiful,
the catastrophe of its history
written on its body.
And though I am not one
who’s been appointed to say
what trees may mean, it was
no mystery why it could hold
me so still, compel my eye
to such study, whenever
I passed that way.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Signs and Wonders
 . 
I’m not entirely in favor of summer,
what with its drop-dead heat,
its shallow unbothered
 . 
air of fullness beyond ending or
enduring. Sure I like to see
half the world disappear
 . 
behind this velvet green pulled from
the magician’s hat of the month
of May just like everybody
 . 
else. And I’m aware of the sun’s
unbearable importance because
why would we have ever
 . 
stood upright if not to get the sun
off our backs when we dropped
from the trees onto
 . 
the burning savannas five million
years ago? Now we can scan
the horizon, carry things
 . 
in our hands, give and take things to
and from one another. From
which all history
 . 
follows. Still, I wonder whether
swinging wordlessly from
branch to branch
 . 
might be better. I don‘t fell all
that thankful towards the
sun for bringing us
 . 
here or staging this big production,
this overwritten text in which
every meaning contains its
 . 
opposite – the furious tenacity
of life calling forth the sev-
ering response of death,
 . 
etc. Just last night I was walking
home thinking is my lover
going to leave me?
 . 
when a dead bird plummeted
from the sky, slammed onto
a car hood and rolled
 . 
onto the sidewalk beside me.
I’m as un-Homeric as the
next person, but Jesus,
 . 
I said, this cannot be a good
sign. Did it have a heart
attack mid-flight, Or
 . 
was it dropped from the talons
of a predator? Or knocked
out of the sky by an
 . 
airplane? Or thrown down by
the god assigned to watch
over and comment on
 . 
my various questions and pre-
dicaments? If we’d stayed
in the cool shade of
 . 
the forest no birds would ever
fall on us, or if they did we
wouldn’t kill ourselves
 . 
trying to decipher what they
might foretell. And this
morning coming up
 . 
the 34th Street subway I passed
a young Russian man hand-
ing out pamphlets, saying,
 . 
“Jesus is alive. Jesus loffs you.”
I don’t think so but I don’t
know anything, only
 . 
that it’s hot and we don’t belong
here and our hands betray us
and you’re gone.
 . 
John Brehm
from Sea of Faith, winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, © 2004
 . 
 .
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
You
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Magic?

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on July 14, 2023| 17 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]
 . 
Abide with Me (excerpt)
 . 
That first year together, we lived in the shadow
of a fishing line factory, next to a super
highway, under a railroad bridge,
 . 
behind a field of junked cars – mountains
of tires, hub caps, and smashed glass – and we
 . 
prayed fervently for our love to return
this world to the poised grace we could imagine
when we touched each other just right, or when we saw sunlight
glint on the stream full of chemicals and junk
that ran by the factory walls.
 . 
We prayed with our yearning. That year we could float things
in midair on the hymns
we sang in perfect harmony.
 . 
We practiced one hymn – “Abide With Me” –
until we could lift cancered minnows from that stream,
until we could lift stray cats and junkyard dogs,
until we could lift each other as high
as our voices carried. We harmonized versions
 . 
of our families and secrets, until we could float
each other in unison, knowing if we fell silent
for even on moment, we’d fall . . .
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When did I lose my knack for magic? Oh, I can still work what from a distance appears to be magic. I can wiggle my nose and make a seven-year old girl laugh. I can pull from my tall black hat the Latin binomial for obscure little flowers that most people don’t even consider flowers. I can perform any number of spells that compel my wee ancient mother to say , “You’re such a good boy.”
 . 
I don’t mean I can’t work magic; I mean I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack of magic working me. This morning the home health aide arrived to ride herd on Mom and Dad so I could spend the morning on the beach with grandson Bert and friends. The kid dads had planned some long postponed surf fishing; while Anthony dug for mole crabs, Josh whirled the casting net into the waves and hoped for minnows. On the third throw he brought up two tiny pompano the size of silver dollars and slipped them into a blue plastic bucket of sea water.
 . 
Bert, Wyatt, and Mari were more than rapt. The magic of flipping silvery fishes totally captured them and transported them into a new realm. Who would have thought four- and five-year olds could stare into a bucket for a solid hour? The magic of touching those velvet smooth wriggles, the magical bigness of becoming the ones responsible for bringing fresh water from the waves and moving the bucket with the shifting shade, the shocking magic of closeness, even intimacy, with something up until now just so many pictures in books – the magic worked those children. I witnessed their magic and regret to confess that I until I did I had only seen those little fish as bait.
 . 
That same evening I drove Mom and Dad over to Bogue Sound – Josh and Bert were going to catch a crab. The tide was right; the dead fish on a string was acceptably fragrant; the blue crab crept closer through the reeds. On his second try, Josh scooped up the dangerous decapod with a dip net and untangled his swimmerets and claws until he plopped into the blue bucket of sound water. A feisty one! Every time Bert moved his hand, the crab snapped claws up out of the water with undaunted ferocity. Bert was magic-smacked. “I never thought I would get this close to a real crab!” This from the boy with a hundred plastic sea creatures of every class, order, and family.
 . 
Perhaps I’ve lost the knack to be worked by magic because I read too much about and spend too little time staring into the blue depths of this unrelentingly odd and utterly magical universe. Perhaps the only hope for me is to catch a little magic as it streams off the children who are still so joyously connected to it. Or perhaps there are others also willing to share their magic. Those persons around me who are inching ever nearer to the magic as the long years of their living come ever nearer to their ending. Driving home from Bert and the Sound at dusk, Mom riding shotgun, I mention, “This is a good time of evening to see bunnies, Mom. Keep your eyes peeled.”
 . 
We turn the corner and Mom spots her at once, a fat cottontail smack in the middle of the neighbor’s lawn. And then we see her two smaller companions, the three of them considering us and chewing thoughtfully as we pass. Mom laughs and claps. “Oh Billy, how did you know we’d see bunnies? It’s just like magic!”
 . 
❦
 . 
One magic that poetry works is to occupy a different life. In Michael Hettich’s poems, he often seems to occupy several lives, each one exceedingly strange and each entirely commonplace. Through the thirty some years that the poems in this collection occupy, the writer walks around trying on other people’s lives. The surprise of his body may be rivers, trees, dry grass, a child sprouting wings. Bodies may be seedpods or they may burst into flame, they might be figures that dissolve into night or into water. These strange and wonderful transpositions and transformations are not fearful or repulsive – we as readers simply step into these bodies with Michael and become part of the magic.
 . 
This is the magic of wildness. Repeatedly, the poems remind us and display for us how wildness is at the heart of each of us. And this is the magic of music, not that the poem uses music to achieve its end but that the noise the world makes is music — poem discovers it and it reveals magic. So many of Michael’s characters sing. Or become song. Those not known for music as well as those whose music we have shut out of our busy non-wild lives. Michael sings, his wife sings, his father and family sing, and the songs weave magic that levitates and elevates and brings joy. When the ringing of my ears and of my machines has deafened me to the everything that makes up this universe of ours – the only known residence, after all, of magic – I know I can return to these poems and be restored.
 . 
The Halo of Bees, New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, Michael Hettich. Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023
Today’s post features “Selected” poems from the collection. Also see last week’s post, Catch Fire, which features “New” poems.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Frogs
 . 
He loved frogs, so he spent his afternoons
wading in the tall grass, or standing in the leafy water
where the stream turned. Charmed by their stories
of woods and muck, he practiced singing with them
at dusk at pond’s edge, while his mother and father
sat talking, with their cocktails, on the porch. As dark fell
his parent called him, most evenings, for dinner,
but sometimes they let him stay down there until the frogs
were hushed by the cicadas, whose conversations
startled him back to himself. He wandered
up to the house through the tall grass, through the dark,
still singing in his own language. Don’t think of him now,
drinking in a city bar, talking to strangers
who ignore him. Don’t think of him walking out into
the empty street, slightly drunk. He’ll be fine.
Think instead of that walk through the dark wet grass,
the sound of a child’s body moving through the grass;
think instead of those frogs falling silent, of that forest,
of mushrooms that push up overnight like elbows
in the moon-drenched mind of the woods.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
House of Light
 . 
Someone breaks open like a seedpod or a flower
to spill out across the street, and we all keep walking by
because it is too beautiful to notice, or too frightening,
as the river just moves on, the clothed and dreaming river,
the speaking river feeling just the way it needs to, nothing more.
There are feathers in the sky. Say birds, generic things,
or simply ignore them. But what about those other people
bursting into flame? will the singe you? Step away
from those other fires, as though you weren’t wild yourself
in all the parts that matter: in your blood and vivid thinking, seeing
colors for their secrets: how to move and be and feel
until you burst aflame. Some buildings built of stone are made
to echo now and then, forever – no one can escape –
but others made of wood are filled with window after window,
so many windows you could ever open all of them
in a single lifetime. No one lives that long. But you could open some.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree

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Catch Fire

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on July 7, 2023| 15 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]
 . 
Core
 . 
The hawk in the white pine shivers, hunched
into itself like a state of being
 . 
we might think had vanished
if we’ve been playing
too long with our gadgets, or making arrangements
to assure our perfect happiness
 . 
sometime in the future. The wind that tossed
cut-down trees
remains a ghost
inside our furniture, like the antique
notion of a soul, and ancient tides
 . 
drew the swirls in the stones that line
our paths. Scars that mark the seasons
 . 
our ancestors lived,
etched like tree rings
into the secrets we don’t even know
we’re keeping; a dream that woke us to forget,
 . 
a blue that dazzles the sky as only
nothing can do, in the morning.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mom has been put to bed, the nurse’s aide has left, and Dad leans hunched in his favorite blue recliner. As he reads each line of his novel, Dad turns his head left to right, back and forth like a cartoon character eating corn-on-the-cob emptying each successive line of kernels, or precisely the opposite, like a typewriter platen that only returns to its starting point when the line has filled itself. Three lines. Five lines. Now Dad’s eyelids droop, his book droops, and just beyond the pocked and cratered moon of his head the windows of the house across the street catch fire with the dying sun. The orange and smoke of the end of day.
 . 
In a few moments Dad will jerk a bit, open his eyes, and read a few more lines. Some additional span of moments beyond that he will put down the book, heave himself from the chair with a grunt, stagger and catch himself on the wall on the way down the hall to bed. Irrelevant. This moment is the luminous, the sun’s reflection filling the neighbor’s windows before they eclipse and darken. This is the fulcrum moment upon which all prior moments and all moments to come must teeter and balance. Perhaps the three of us present in this old house feel its presence as we breathe in and breathe out, the very quiet house hanging by its fingernails to its own particular very quiet light in this dark whirling night-welcoming time-swallowing universe.
 . 
As I continue to watch, Dad turns his head, a fraction of an arc just barely perceptible, left to right.
 . 
❦
 . 
Core – the first poem in the first section of this new collection by Michael Hettich – is indeed the core and carries me there with it. A state of being. The secret interior liveliness of things, of all things. The ghosts that connect every one of us if we believe their essence.
 . 
I can’t turn the page. I have to return to the first line and begin again. Moments coalesce. I reread images and stanzas in different orders. It is a poem of being and a poem of becoming. I am filled with this one poem and overcome with the awareness of secrets residing in the most mundane things that surround me.
 . 
My son-in-law Josh has constructed a hive, a Ritz Carlton of a hive in my view, and he awaits a swarm. He teaches me about the living organism which is a family of bees. When they sense some ethereal signal, perhaps overcrowding or overly plentiful surroundings, the workers begin the special feeding of a newly hatched larva who will grow into a new queen. The hive cannot have two queens. When the new matures, the old queen takes half the workers and leaves to swarm. If Josh is particularly blessed, if the offerings of beeswax and lemongrass with which he has anointed his hive box are acceptable, the swarm will take up residence and begin making new bees. And new honey.
 . 
The thirty “new” poems in this “new and selected” are themselves such a living organism. They move together through darkness to bring flickering glimpses of light as in dreams. They know there is a core and they seek it. They find wildness in everything and they celebrate it. They are “a sudden glimpse into the silence between thoughts.” All the while the writer, and we readers, too, if we follow, questions the person he was and the person he might become. And in the process of all this seeking and discovery, perhaps each of us may encounter the person we are.
 . 
The Halo of Bees, New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, Michael Hettich. Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023
 . 
…
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Another Kind of Silence
 . 
Sometimes the world grows louder, you realize,
just as the day falls still
and insects whose names you’ll never know
start screaming and laughing, scraping their wings,
then falling silent. It’s as though there were some
 . 
technology that could capture your dreams
and throw them on a screen, to show you to yourself
and confuse you more deeply, you who are not
alone but live in solitude, never
seeing anyone but yourself, even
 . 
when you are talking with your friends and family,
even when you’re moving through a crowd, thinking
 . 
Everything is wild at its core, even
half-asleep evenings in front of the TV,
even listless afternoons shopping
for knickknacks, or food. And food is especially
wild. Just think of all those apples and grains
of rice, just think of that wine
ripening as grapes in the bright sun of some
foreign country, the bees and even
 . 
the bats zig-zagging through the gloaming, singing
as they feast – another kind of silence:
 . 
music your ears are not built to hear,
like the roots of these trees, humming as they soak up
the puddles that have deepened for so many days
you hardly remember how the sunlight feels
on your body, how it makes you squint
and see things differently, the way it makes everything
 . 
waver and shimmer, like a mirage
you walk toward, never arriving.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Dark House 
.  . 
Trust the simple things, she said then, to lead us
through this dark house, hands outstretched to feel
what we can’t see, as we touch a wall,
a table, or a chair we can sit in and wait
for morning. Maybe we’ll talk of small pleasures
 . 
or just listen to each other’s breath. We might seem to see
dreams flicker through our open eyes,
though it needs to be darker, even darker than it is now,
and they only flicker briefly. Don’t be scared.
We can hold hands and listen for our heartbeats, and maybe
 . 
if we can locate a window in the wall,
we can open it and let the outside darkness
rush in with its clarity and wildness; we can sit here
talking of what we imagine must live
out here, waiting for first light – like we are –
 . 
or moving through the dark like the moon does, pulling
the tides inside us, oceans we might even
swim out in, naked and warm, until morning
when we’ll be out of sight, so far from shore
our lives there might go on without us.
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
…
 . 
…
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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