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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

❦ ❦ ❦

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

❦ ❦ ❦

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

❦ ❦ ❦

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.

❦ ❦ ❦

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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Moving Day

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, family, I-70 Review, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Rebecca Baggett, Richard Widerkehr, Southern writing on October 18, 2024| 6 Comments »

[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.

❦ ❦ ❦

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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Remembering Dannye Romine Powell

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Dannye Romine Powell, grief, longing, NC Poets, New Year, poetry, Press 53, Southern writing on October 12, 2024| 8 Comments »

I learned today from our friends at CHARLOTTELIT that Dannye Romine Powell died on October 10, 2024. She was a joyful and fearless supporter of literature, the arts, and poetry in North Carolina for many decades, and whenever I asked her advice or permission to use her work, she was a gracious friend.

I am re-printing this post from December 30, 2020 so that we can share again these evocative poems by Dannye. In Memoriam.

❦ ❦ ❦

NEW

[with poems by Dannye Romine Powell]

When we lower her pack from the tree where it has swung all night like a bell mocking the bear, the skunk, she opens it and screams: a fairy crown atop her sweatshirt and socks, a perfect round nest and four perfect hairless mouse pups like squirming blind grubs. We peer in awe, shepherds at the manger.

Mother mouse has hidden herself — she is not in the pack with her babies. We lift the nest intact, hide it in a bush beside the tree, nestle leaves around. Mother will sniff out her precious ones, reclaim her treasure. But we have other lambs to tend.

We eat, stow gear, shoulder our packs, face the trail, and consider: the pack was in the tree just one night; the nest is woven from meadow grass where we slept; the mother who climbed – how many trips up and back? – was heavy with her brood.

Miles before us, a new year before us – how heavy will each day’s burdens become before night brings rest?

. . . . . . .

A new book by Dannye Romine Powell arrived in the mail this week: In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver from Press 53 in Winston-Salem. I meant to read one or two poems this morning but I have read them all. A central persona that weaves through the collection is Longing: she visits rooms in old houses, unfolds memories into the light, shares the pain that others might lock in closets. Grief shared conceives within us hope to rekindle joy. Sharing grief, sharing joy, we become more human.

. . . . . . .

The Secret

Light glazes the near-empty streets
as I drive. Beside me, my grown son asks
if a secret I thought I’d kept buried
is true. A secret
that can still catch fire.
We stop on red. A bird flies
by the windshield. My father’s words:
Easier to stand on the ground
and tell the truth than climb a tree
and tell a lie. Now, I think. Tell him.
I stare at my son’s profile,
straight nose, thick lashes.
I remember, at about his age,
how a family secret fell
into my lap, unbidden.
That secret still ransacks a past
I thought I knew, rearranging its bricks,
exposing rot and cracks,
changing the locks on trust.

. . . . . . .

In the Night, the Wind in the Leaves

swirled and rustled
out our open window as if
for the first time,
as if we never were,
the earth newborn, sweet.

And what of us – asleep
on the too-soft bed
in the old mountain house?

Gone.

Also our children.
the ones who lived, the ones who died
before they grew whole. All night

the breeze swirled and rustled
through the leaves as if it played
a secret game, swirling
and rustling all night

as if we never were.

. . . . . . .

Dannye Romine Powell has won fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared over the years in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Harvard Review Online, Beloit, 32 Poems, and many others. She is also the author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. For many years, she was the book editor of the Charlotte Observer. In 2020 she won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition for her poem “Argument.”