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Anticipate

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 27, 2024| 10 Comments »

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[with poems by Michael Hettich, Kenneth Chamlee, Katherine Soniat]
 . 
First View – Chicago Lakes
 . 
Sleet needles past my fastened collar
as we rise into the house of rain.
Mr. Byers of the Mountain News
has horsed us up this flyspeck path
with avowals of Alpine views but
now is silent. I think he has missed
the spur trail. My blood is gelid,
fingers numb beyond recovery.
Clouds tickle and drip and when we crest
this timbered ridge I will ask that-Oh!
Sublime cirque! The Alps surpassed again!
Stay the mules-I must-I need my paints,
stool. Fifteen minutes, please you; see how
the near lake mirrors the breaking storm
with light fine as milkweed fluff, that one
pearled peak soft as the edge of heaven!
 . 
Kenneth Chamlee
from The Best Material for the Artist in the World; Albert Bierstadt, a Biography in Poems, Stephen F. Austin University Press, Nacogdoches TX; © 2023. Finalist for the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
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First Nature, Once Removed
 . 
Is childhood different from any body of (loose) clothing or rising water? Make
of it what you will. +++ I did. +++ +++ Some are grounded by target practice
 . 
but return with leaks known as homesickness for life. +++ +++ Wobbly
flotilla of cargo I was . . . no water-wings to inflate. Imagine those wings
 . 
I did not have +++ but suspected were present +++ when it was calm enough
to reflect and pull faces into focus. +++ +++ Wishing is like sadness at sea.
 . 
Say, you are on a beach with waves – the circular myth of family collapsing.
I had this part-time job of being a daughter apart – job that paid in tips
 . 
for those with damp inward pauses. +++ +++ Deep water girl
who keeps washing up anywhere. +++ +++ +++ Everywhere.
 . 
I was a surprise to those gathered in bed. +++ How I rose to float in
on a man and woman dancing in bed. +++ +++ Or were they clouds?
 . 
I could not keep them straight +++ +++ (though they were trying
hard to act happy) +++ like knives flying simultaneously as birds
 . 
at twilight.
 . 
Katherine Soniat
from Fates: Starfish Washup, Etruscan Press, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre PA; © 2023. Finalist for the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Parents
 . 
One morning, my wife and I followed our eight-year-old
daughter along a crowded beach
just far enough behind her that she wasn’t aware
we followed, as she walked with her energetic stride,
swinging her arms as though she were singing.
 . 
We marveled at her independence, at her
fearlessness; we compared her to other
children we knew, who would never have ventured
so far with such self-confidence.
 . 
We were congratulating ourselves on our excellent parenting
skills, laughing proudly at her spirit,
wondering where she was going with such
lively determination, when she stopped
 . 
and turned to look back: she was crying, with such
deep heaves she could hardly, breathe, desperately
lost. She’d been frantically looking for us
and the place we’d left our towels–she feared
we’d forgotten her, gone home without her.
 . 
What could we say, kneeling beside her
in the bright sun–we’d been right there
the whole time, behind her, laughing affectionately
at the way she walked, as she walked
 . 
the wrong direction to find us, at the way
she looked from behind as she searched for us,
as she howled in such terror
we thought she was singing?
 . 
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems, 1990-2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2023. Winner of the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina writer.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Which is better, to expect beauty and encounter exactly that, or to arrive without expectation or anticipation and be surprised by joy? Which is worse, to open the window on a forecast of sun and discover drizzle, or to walk around every day under a cloud with no awareness of a sun above? Which is worse, to tool around for years just one county removed from your anger, or to cross the line and smack into it head on? Which is better, fond memories of the past or even fonder memories of the future?
 . 
Each of today’s three poems appears in books selected by Eric Pankey, this year’s judge of the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society: winner Michael Hettich for The Halo of Bees and finalists Kenneth Chamlee, The Best Material for the Artist in the World, and Katherine Soniat, Starfish Washup. What if everything we can sense and see turns into something wholly unexpected? Don’t the most beautiful creatures sometime pack the deadliest stings? What if even time itself slips us up, the solid past dissolving into mist and mud, this moment twisting inside out like a Moebius strip? What if a poem doesn’t begin or flow or lead us where we anticipated, and what if it doesn’t end as we hoped?
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❦
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Emerging from COVID’s virtual meetingspaces two years ago, the NC Poetry Society made a studied decision to emerge as well from its long tradition of meeting four times each year in Southern Pines at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. Last September’s meeting convened at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Each September meeting serves to showcase readings by contest winners: the Brockman-Campbell Book Award (NCPS); the Lena Shull Poetry Manuscript Award (NCPS); the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition (NC Writers Network); the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship (NCPS and co-sponsor Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities); and the Jackie Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize (NCPS in partnership with NC Literary Review and East Carolina University).
 . 
This September 14 NCPS gathered at the North Carolina Arboretum outside Asheville. As if award winning readings in such a beautiful venue were not enough, the afternoon program connected the gardens, mountains, and wild spaces into a workshop by Kathrine Cays, “Writing the Natural World.” Kathrine offered many prompts and led a guided meditation to coax us to listen to the voices of earth and sky around us, and to the voice within us that reaches to connect with nature. (See last week’s poem by Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest, which Kathrine read to open her workshop.) How can I sense the communities and individuals that create my world? What do flower, tree, bird, beetle want to say to each other, and to me? How can I discover my true place on earth and return gratitude and reverence in a way that sustains me, and sustains the earth?
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2024 Contest Winners
 . 
Brockman-Campbell Award: given annually to the best book of poetry published by a North Carolina poet during the past year
Winner: Michael Hettich, The Halo of Bees
Finalist: Katherine Soniat, Starfish Washup
 . 
Lena Shull Award: honors the best manuscript of unpublished poetry written by a native or resident of North Carolina
Winner: Doug Sutton-Ramspeck, Smoke Memories
Honorable Mention: Maura High, Field as Auditorium
Honorable Mention: Becky Nichole James, Little Draughts and Hurricanes
 . 
Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship: in honor of the life and work of Susan Laughter Meyers; co-sponsor Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities
Winner: John Amen
Honorable Mention: Maria Martin, Terri McCord, Claudine R. Moreau, Erica Takacs
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Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize: honors the best performance poem by a writer who fits the NCLR definition of a North Carolina writer; co-sponsor North Carolina Literary Review / East Carolina University
1st Place: Edward Mabrey
2nd Place: Jess Kennedy
3rd Place: Marcial “CL” Harper
Honorable Mention: Alessandra Nysether-Santos, Regina YC Garcia, Brenda Bailey
 . 
Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition: one poem by any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network; sponsored by NCWN
Winner: Lee Stockdale
Honorable Mention: Jackson Benton, Mary Alice Dixon
More information about all North Carolina Poetry Society contests HERE
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Unseen Life

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2024| 14 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Catherine Carter]
 . 
Good morning, unseen
John-John was back from college and told Moses that 99 percent of
the matter in the universe is invisible to the human eye. Ever since,
Moses made sure to greet what he could not see.
        –“A Good Story,” Sherman Alexie,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
 . 
Good morning, bacteria
breeding in my coiled gut,
your endless collective of many
the true core of my one. Good
morning, yeasts fermenting
diligently away at all my crevices
and folds, and magnetic field
of gravity which grounds me so close
to this home planet, your pull connecting
the water in this flesh with the drag
of the moon beneath these feet.
Good morning, hairs of fungi
connecting tree to tree and all
earth to all other earth. Good morning,
trails of mouse urine
through the multifarious paths
of grass, which to the vision
of the hovering sparrow hawk glow
ultraviolet, forming arrows
which point the way to the door
of the soft grass-lined burrow.
Good morning, possum crushed
by the roadside, visible but
from which most eyes flick away,
your unseen atoms already
disaggregating to take on fresh
lives as fly larva, carrion beetle, silver
flash beneath the flight pinion
fo the black buzzard, the death-
devourer. Good morning, unmet eyes
of Maria, whose home is this
intersection’s northeast corner;
good morning, ongoing anguish
of the lumbar vertebra fractured
in the stockroom job where she
broke and was fired for breaking;
good morning, urgent grip
of the bowels she must walk
a mile to relieve from this corner
where she stands with her sign
hoping for change that won’t come.
And good morning, unrecorded
conference called in a corner suite,
which even now is about to close
the shelter where tonight she hopes to sleep.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Not secret. Not hidden. Neither cloaked nor covert, simply not seen. These are the glimpses of my mother’s life I am getting since she died. No tremors from within locked strongboxes, no heart attacks delivered by anonymous post – simply the small bright fragments of her unseen life. The bits not dependent on her being Mom to me.
 . 
I’m paying more attention to the glimpses because I don’t have Mom beside me on the couch any more, although she was never one to draw attention to herself anyway. Here they come, all these versions of my mother through the years, fragmentary visions arriving in photos I’ve glanced at in the past but never really examined. Here she is on her bike, smiling, maybe ten years old; here’s that very same smile again at another age, at every age. What confidence, what honesty! So open. A real person smiling at me.
 . 
Today I’ve found her college annuals – do universities still publish such things? Do people still save them for 75 years? Here’s Mom with the other officers of her Freshman class, 1946, and she the President. I never knew! As a Junior her she is at the centerfold – with a dozen friends – from their listing in Who’s Who in American Universities. The two women beside her remained her friends for life, names even I recall her mentioning. Such a full, rich world Mom inhabited. So many worlds.
 . 
In a few weeks we’ll hold Mom’s memorial service and I’ll no doubt hear even more stories of her unseen life. Already Linda’s youngest sister has told us how she loved Miss Cookie as her Kindergarten teacher. Linda and I were already away at college; the only glimpse I had of Mom’s teaching life was when she brought the gerbils and ducklings home from her classroom for holidays. I wish I’d had the curiosity and imagination to follow her around her world for a few days. But no – she was just our Mom.
 . 
Grief is the empty place beside me on the couch that becomes the empty place inside. I try to fill it with memories, all those moments I’ve known and seen, but they aren’t nearly enough. Where to find more? Show me everything I missed before so I can try harder to open my eyes. Show me every bright fragment. Good morning, Unseen.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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This Stone
 . 
This stone is a particular stone,
mica-flecked lichen-splotched quartz-
veined hunk of granite hunched
by the side of the road where I climb the cove.
It has a history; it has been places.
It knew the molten earth-heart
and the grind of the glacier.
It gouged grooves in the flesh
of this world as gravity dragged it down.
It crushed small plants in its path,
and offered a matrix to lichen,
coolness to soil in the heat of the day,
shelter to mushrooms, midges, mice.
This one particular manifestation
of all that rockness,
created in fire, is still
joining in creation,
participating in being. It has known
billions of mornings; this one
is new. Though it will not answer,
I nod to it as I pass, and, if no one
human is there to hear, I speak:
good morning, you one
rock exactly like no
other. Here we are again,
short life and long one
brushing past each other beside
this road of crushed and broken
stone. Good morning,
spirit of earth, on this one morning
here on earth’s stony flesh.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beyond perception as well as beneath notice, these are the unseen in Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen. The bacteria in our gut upon which our lives and health depend. The homeless woman who might once have thought she could depend on the lives around her. Noticing the ignored and overlooked and essential: Catherine’s piercing images and mind frothing metaphors bring all into stark relief. These poems are revelation.
 . 
How did I miss that? Why am I only now first seeing? Unseen is the dirt that bears me up, unseen is sunlight fusing itself into wood. Glad may be the cat in coyote country but Magic is one man opening the door to one small apartment as refuge. It’s all around us, always has been. The first commandment is “pay attention.” Forgive us for how often we have sinned.
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❦
 . 
Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen is available from Jacar Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The unseen says
 . 
from the magnolia I wave to you through the wind,
my dark leaves quivering in the glitter of winter
sun, though I knew you would not see.
As the dog I rest my chin on our bed,
tell you it’s safe to wake, as you shudder with the fear
and despair you clutch so close.
Under your feet as the dirt I bear you up;
as the air without which you cannot live
two hundred seconds, I lift your rigs again, again,
seven hundred million times, never wearying
until you do. As the sunlight I fuse myself
into wood, bursting forth again in flame;
as the rain I show you safe passage, falling,
seeping, leaping through my selves the clouds and the sea.
As you breathe, as you drink as you stretch cramped hands
to my electric coil, toast me in the bread, you ask
whether I’m even here, or forget to ask.
Refugee on the long road, back bent
with the treasures you lug, the fears you haul:
lay down the weighted silver, your grandparents;
plate and grief, let home evaporate behind you,
unbind the albatross corpse festering your neck.
Set it all down. Be free of it,
and take my hand in yours. With a second hand,
and a third, I pipe for you now:
just for a moment, dance.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1827

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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]
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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
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❦ ❦ ❦
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“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.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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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Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

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