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Old Sam Peabody

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 9, 2024| 14 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Jenny Bates]
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Essential
 . 
Trees are a gathering of circles.
 . 
If I touch this tree
say your name,
 . 
Light from the moon, the stars
will burn inside it.
 . 
Frost kindles its leaves to flame,
Spills them on to yellowing grass.
 . 
Unchanged.
 . 
From prehistoric times the ages
are inconsolable, so they turn.
Mantle shadows by truly seeing them.
I tell you this as I touch the tree,
circle this tree, say your name.
 . 
The tree and its golden mean listen
without an ear to hear.
 . 
As you wear yourself out
with a single essential thought.
 . 
Give.
 . 
Jenny Bates
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Ah, February – enter the season of Romance! Naturalists will mark its approach with sightings of large red heart-shaped boxes lining the entrance to Food Lion. Outdoors we notice that, yes indeed, that gray squirrel robbing the feeder looks nicely plump: she will deliver her puplets in a high leafy nest on Saint V’s Day. Wood frogs and peepers, surprise!, have already begun to sing their amorous invitations to amplexus. Owls have a jump on the festivities, already nesting, while there is a general restiveness and revving among the yard birds.
 . 
For Linda and me, the end of winter and first blood flow of Spring are marked by a plaintive two note whistle issuing from the rhododendron. There it is again! A rising minor third, clear and bright, the introduction to a joyful motet, the Oh My! of Oh my Canada, Canada, Canada. The White-Throated Sparrow is tuning up.
 . 
Why do birds sing? All winter the white-throat has minded his own business, hopping in the litter beneath the feeders or posing quite sage in the azalea. Now he sings his first couple of notes, but within a few weeks he will have flown far from here to breed in Maine or Michigan or the infinite boreal forests of Canada. Why sing now? Obviously his whistling can’t be to establish a territory in our back yard. And it defies imagination to think he’d hope to attract a mate here in North Carolina and keep her by his side all the way to Quebec. Today’s song, to judge from the snippets and fragments he’s practicing, sounds like he’s just warming up tor the big date.
 . 
Here’s how I see him – my little White-Throated Sparrow is Jeremy Brett in My Fair Lady, walking down the street where she lives. He’s passed this way before, but today the pavement simply refuses to stay beneath his feet. Days lengthen and love fills his breast until it is impossible any longer to resist – it must overflow in song. And so although the street where she really lives is 1,000 miles from here, White Throat graces Linda and me here in the NC foothills with his opening aria of Romance. Ah, February!
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❦
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* The song of the White-Throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollia) comprises a couplet of long clear ascending whistles followed by three more rapid triplets, and can also be recalled by the mnemonic, Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.
 . 
** On the Street Where You Live, 1956, Lerner & Lowe, from the musical My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn & Rex Harrison, with Jeremy Brett as Freddy singing: “I have often walked down this street before / but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. / All at once am I several stories high, / knowing I’m on the street where you live . . . .”
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Red and Green
 . 
where the surface of one thing meets the surface of another . . .
— William Bridges
 . 
You were twisting and turning
leaping and swerving a flame
 . 
on each foot, on a field so green
so green – so gorgeously
 . 
green, the earth’s addiction.
 . 
And you, warrior Fox as you fought
you fought off the mysterious foe, rattled like
 . 
a shaman losing part of his soul.
 . 
You danced between spirit and spirit and matter
danced all parts of your body a spontaneous me!
 . 
When you finally stopped puffing
from chaos, from chaos and glee you flowed
 . 
a rhythm of stillness – so still
 . 
you stood as if in meditation
and mantra on what you created.
 . 
Jenny Bates
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I have never met Jenny Bates but I imagine a visit to her home in the woods. Afternoon sun through west-facing panes is captured by glass in the colors of earth, sky, pasture, summer asters. We don’t remain indoors but take our mugs of oswego tea with local honey out beneath the pines. Dusk creeps in and we allow it to fill us with its silence. Creatures creep closer as well, wild but curious. If we were to threaten them, they would flee or turn and slash, but we and they simply remark each other’s presence and respect our distance. They go about their crepuscular business and grant us leave to be part of their universe. Being part of. Communion. Creating wholeness. The highest call and at once the most confounding task of the rational being.
 . 
This is also a visit to Jenny’s poetry in the woods. The universe Jenny Bates creates through words is one of deep acceptance and communion. Essential, from Redhawk Publications, continues her series of books which create a sort of natural theology. The You whom Jenny addresses in so many of her poems – is it God? A spirit familiar? A ghostly memory? Or is it the fox who stares cautiously from the edge of night? You might be a source of answers but more often is simply one with whom to share the questions. In this universe, there is no supernatural, only the fundamental reality that we are all one. One, that is, if we are able to open ourselves that much.
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❦
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Visit Redhawk Publications and purchase Essentials HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Be Bold
 . 
I said to the Woodpecker
as I lifted it off the ground
cradled it for a half an hour, this
second Woodpecker to break its neck.
 . 
I’m no angel I said to him, though I’ve
been called it many times
a few drops of Be Bold I tell myself
when there is a need, but sometimes
those drops don’t soak in and I’m left
buckling to my knees.
 . 
The body will be gone by morning
and sure enough it was, yet still I
struggle How can one keep up with
death stare it in the face? Or program our
unconscious to react in certain ways?
 . 
Sweet smelling or dour unpleasant odors
are all we instinctively know, and here,
I’m not too Bold.
I placed the bird on one big leaf, hearing
another drum away
laid his head on dry curled grass
a pine bough for a wreath
both of us changed and changing
the pattern of our resonance.
 . 
Jenny Bates
from Essential, Redhawk Publications, Hickory, NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? This morning I discover Romeo Sparrow perched in the Silverbell. He turns to gaze fondly at Juliet, perched one branch higher. Perhaps they have booked adjoining seats for the flight to their Canada!!
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Rushing

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2024| 10 Comments »

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[ with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
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Adaptation
 . 
Some days I hardly remember
what it is to fly
 . 
what loss is
When morning feels like betrayal
and shoulders ache
with the sudden load of gravity
pressed into cruel bones
too human for wings
 . 
As if I never once awoke
hair smelling of clouds
wound in wild knots
and damp with tears
 . 
or slept
curled in a crevice of wind
 . 
Other days I recall myself
grace confined to memory
in which I have never flown
and it was only ever a tale
from childhood
I was never meant to believe
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A shift in warmth of Pacific seas, a wet winter in the South: throughout January a storm a week, sometimes two, but this afternoon we are braving mud to hike our favorite trail from Carter Falls to Grassy Creek. The little farm pond is full and we see the channel where it overflows to carve a deeper path through last summer’s grasses and sedges. Both white pine groves have evidence of freshets, scoured hardpan courses with needles layered thick along each side. We cross Martin Byrd Road to enter the woods that curve alongside the big cornfield and wonder what we’ll find. Even though the acres are planted in winter rye, how much soil has rushed off those slopes and furrows into Grassy Creek?
 . 
The trail quickly turns downhill and we see the storms’ impact. Red field clay has silted full the first drainage swale and overtopped it to rush down the trail bed in a boiling soupy froth. Exposed roots and deep mud. Our trail crews clean out these erosion control features twice a year but one wet January has damaged the trail more than ten years of hikers’ boots. Too much water, too much incline, too much gravity.
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep, writes Rae Spencer of water. It must seek its level, it must flow, it must rush. Water and time alike, each of them relentless and not to be held back. Have I spent too much of my life rushing? Have I abandoned will and wisdom to be always doing, doing? Even now my dreams are filled with urgency, long hallways, behind each door a patient fretting to be seen, and I with no hope of catching up. Waking from such, who would want to get out of bed and get started?
 . 
Better trail design can’t completely compensate for poor tillage and agricultural neglect, but the rest of today’s trail is actually in quite good shape. The outer berm has been mostly raked clear and there are several grade dips and rises that keep water from following the treadway. When we reach the more rustic forest bathing trail, it’s even better – consistent outsloping camber, plenty of runoff. Water’s gonna rush. Life too, I guess. How to prepare? How to respond? How to slow things down for a bit? A walk through quiet woods, a quiet hour with a book of poetry – maybe tonight my dreams will proceed more leisurely.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Of Warbler and Quail
 . 
Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else
 . 
But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer
 . 
As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back
 . 
But this little warbler
outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear
 . 
Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent
 . 
Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore
 . 
Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks
 . 
That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar
 . 
And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars
 . 
Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail
 . 
Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Memory – home – loss – the path forward: Rae Spencer’s poetry has a distinctly formal feel as she settles deeply into these themes. Formal in the sense of meticulous language, lush natural imagery and description, architectural lines, internal rhyme. These poems need to be read slowly as they linger in the moment before releasing one to ponder and discover the writer’s metaphors, and discovering one’s own.
 . 
Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. I am perfectly happy to pause and listen with warbler and bobwhite as the poet weaves from their stories one of longing for home (Of Warbler and Quail). I think I’m ready now for racoon to teach me how to live (Adaptable). At the close of Doppler Effect, I sit and listen long to the change in pitch of life I know I must expect, and prepare for, as my own parents age and travel their final days.
 . 
Poetry, in its phrasing, its junctures, its juxtaposition, often moves at the pace of breath. Speak it aloud, pause when it needs you to. Stop and linger in the midst of these lines so that they may breathe into you.
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❦
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[hint: I re-type the poems for these posts (thank you to my freshman touch typing teacher), fingers slower than scanning eyes, speaking the words individually in my head, each syllable and carriage return (aka line break) – so often in the adagio the lines reveal secrets of how they mean.]
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Rae Spencer lives in Virginia, USA. As well as writing, she is a practicing veterinarian. Of Warbler and Quail first appeared in Bolts of Silk. Gravity first appeared in vox poetica.
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Watershed is available from Kelsay Books HERE. Learn more about Rae HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Gravity
 . 
Water doesn’t want
It only weighs
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep
Downhill, settling to the lowest pool
 . 
Rivers cascade and marshes ooze
Toward inlet and gulf
Where tides surge
 . 
With the arid moon
Sere face lowered
In serene reflection
Over oblivious blue
 . 
Depths that teem with tin and polyp
Oyster clades awash in brine
That neither murmurs nor sighs
Through a shell
 . 
Held to the ear we hear
Blood’s heave
An eternal chorus
Singing sailors to sea
Dreamers to sleep
 . 
Daughters to voice
Their bare feet anchored
In restless churn
On heavy, ancient shores
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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Wisp

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2024| 12 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Debra Kaufman]
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Walking Westerly, My Shadow Precedes Me
 . 
She does not hear a warning
in the wren’s song,
+++++++++ as I do,
or see the ghost moon as an omen.
 . 
She appears to have a jauntier step,
wilder hair, longer, slimmer limbs.
 . 
Perhaps she is the me
I once was –
waitress, dancer, diary keeper.
 . 
Nothing bad
has happened yet.
+++++++++ Soon
 . 
she will trail a dangerous
fragrance, be sniffed out,
tracked, pinned down.
 . 
Wind trembles the beech leaves.
The wren calls again.
 . 
I step toward the past,
she into the future
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
If you believe that everything is connected;
if you believe that matter and energy are conserved (not to mention angular momentum);
if you believe that the breath you’ve just taken into your body, its oxygen reddening your corpuscles, worked its way up the hill from the great red oak not tumbled in last spring’s tornado, and that when you release it a second from now it will begin to wisp its way back down to wait for the asters you’ve sowed on wind-scoured earth;
if you believe that your body is stardust, its phosphorus and calcium and that fleck of selenium, every element which is heavier than air;
if you believe that no distance is too far and no time too long a thread to tie everything together and extend the connection,
++++++++++ then believe this:
 . 
when that wisp of a woman sitting on the couch beside your father and his baby sister, white-haired tiny flit of a woman no more substance than moonbeam, when she smiles it will light up the string of a million smiles stretching back so far that every smile since must take its cue, all the way back to the very first smile twenty-five years (less thirteen days) before you were born.
 . 
Recall those smiles you can and hold onto them — you dancing while she plays Mozart on the piano and laughs; she holding the cake while you take a deep breath to blow; beaches and playgrounds, jokes and canasta, weddings and first smiles of your own babies shared with her. Most smiles have flown to continue their cycle, petal of a flower she will notice, bug she’ll try to pick up from the carpet, a noise or a vision in some other creature’s thread of existence . . .
 . 
. . . but some precious few smiles are preserved in silver. Layers of atoms on glossy paper. Here’s one that her niece, your cousin, has just handed you, holding its connection to the others over seven decades in the bottom of a carton waiting for your gathering today. You hold it close for her to see and she smiles again.
 . 
Look! Today’s smile! When you see it, recognize its provenance, its taxonomy, its lineage and inheritance from all that have preceded it. Accept its assurance. So much lost, so much consigned to this or that flimsy drawer in the cupboard of memory (yours) and so many keys to so many drawers misplaced (hers), but still firmly by that long and winding thread as tenuous as breath connected. Every wisp connected.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The last time my mother
 . 
spoke words I heard
I saw her see me in a flash:
You’re my daughter!
We walked the hall,
a circumference
around the single rooms.
Round and round.
Each time we passed
the common room
she’d point to the Christmas lights.
 . 
On her bed lay a book
of her wedding photos.
I named the names, some small comfort.
I sang “Jacob’s Ladder”
and she smiled in that puzzled way.
 . 
I meant to rub lotion on her legs –
her skin dry, tissue-paper thin –
but they were calling her
for supper. I kissed her cheek.
She kissed my hand,
did not want to let it go.
 . 
I hoped we’d see a few sparrows
out her window, but
dark coming early, I saw only
our ghostly selves reflected there.
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Yet if we do not stare despair in its face
(I hear you say) how will we recognize
 . 
the silver sliver of moon
when it hangs suspended like a dream?
 . 
++++++++++ from Bearing / Witness
 . 
Moonrise this past Monday was 2:37 PM in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. Waxing gibbous, we spot her on the one clear afternoon without rain. We won’t have to worry about finding our way through the darkened house at bedtime. Light will precede us, follow us, attend us. We can’t summon the moon or assign her course; we can only watch and trust she will return. We can only recognize and be grateful.
 . 
I didn’t want to get out of bed that Monday morning. All the motivations and machinations of the preceding week – phone calls, site visits, family conferences – had cooled and dissipated. Who says energy is conserved? I sat at my desk, the to-do list accruing and scrolling in my head, not knowing how to begin. And then there was Debra Kaufman’s new book waiting patiently at the top of the pile. I opened to the first poem. The clamp on my innards released and breath returned.
 .  . 
Moon, and of course shadow, are recurring images in Outwalking the Shadow. It is no coincidence that metaphor and metamorph are nearly homologues. Images may shift their shapes and meanings, may stand in for any number of times and spaces, but moon and shadow link arms, weave a net, cast it out and draw us in. Debra does more than create contrasts. Her poems are not satisfied to simply cast light into the dark umbra of grief. Enter her lines and welcome the shadow, relive it, discover how and who it has made you. Recognize that light blinds when it glares but enlightens when it glimmers, slivers, almost ephemeral as dream.
 . 
Recognize that each of us lives with our shadow, and that even moonlight may cast one. Debra’s book is dedicated to her mother, Kathleen, and many of the poems explore her life, their life together, her final days, thereafter. Debra’s poems encompass much, much more than grieving, however. In many of her lines, I hear her speaking the very phrases I have needed to speak to my own heart. Perhaps you, too, have had mornings when you found it a burden to take even one step, when you felt empty and powerless and alone. These poems admit that. We are human and we carry our shadows. But these poems surprise themselves with sudden flashes and connections – a summoning of crows, a lesson learned, a visitation by spirits. Every time I turn another page, I discover more of what I need. Come, let us walk out together. There may still be joy if we open ourselves.
 . 
❦
 . 
More about Debra Kaufman, Outwalking the Shadow from Redhawk Press, and how to purchase HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Let my heart swing open
 . 
like French doors to a garden of blowsy flowers,
saloon doors where Kitty serves shots of rye,
a screen door with a farm wife waving you in,
 . 
or let my heart be a picture window
through which I see everyone I have ever loved,
my breath steaming the glass, come in,
 . 
we’ll turn up the party lights,
show all the passersby we’re dancing,
or better yet, let’s all spill out into the street,
 . 
my heart a village music festival –
welcome teachers, firefighters, cashiers, nurses,
shysters and spinsters, salsa dancers a skateboarders,
 . 
cat lovers, detasselers, twirlers and high-steppers,
come in you scuffed shoes, rhinestones, flannels,
I’ll be a mirror reflecting all y’all’s kindness,
 . 
your clumsy moves and broken bits,
your sad patience and patient wildness,
your generosity, crankiness, haunted dreams –
 . 
I’ll be the hostess sprinkling blessings like petals,
saying, The universe is here and so are we – 
champagne for everyone!
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

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