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Convolutions

Posted in ecology, family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 8, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Beth Copeland]
 . 
Fog
 . 
Morning fog erases the mountain and trees.
No, not an erasure but unseen.
 . 
Not an erasure but unseen.
The mountain, the laurel still green.
 . 
Unlike the mountain and laurel still green,
the dearly departed lie beneath white sheets.
 . 
The deer depart beneath white sheets
of fog, stepping into a forgotten dream
 . 
of fog slipping into a forgotten dream
the ghost mountain dreams.
 . 
The ghost mountain dreams.
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings.
 . 
Crows fly to pines on mascara wings,
mourning. Fog erases the mountain, the trees.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
It’s a big web, here in the corner of our screened porch, but I’m not ready yet to broom it down. The spider is a jointed dried kernel in its center; when I blow, she doesn’t twitch. I don’t see an egg pouch or spiderlings. The strands are not an orb but a diffuse tangle, a chaos of delicate angles and tensions — a miniature of filaments revealed by the background microwave radiation that weave the structure of our entire universe. And what are they made of, those filaments? These I can see before me are nanometer reworkings of hemolymph from mosquitoes denied the opportunity to bite me. Most visible when dusted with pollen. A mess. But I and my broom are not ready yet to offend, to say farewell to the tribe of spiders.
 . 
Last week we visited Blue Whales with our grandson, turning eight. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is hosting this exhibit of the largest creatures that have ever lived on our planet – the mystery of their migrations, language, culture; the vital interconnections between their diet of krill, their massive enriching orange poop, and the entire deep ocean ecology. Linda and I stood in silence before the model of a blue whale brain and a model of our own. The whale’s is twice as large and twice as complex, convoluted with its twisting gyri and deep sulci. Surely such an abundance of neurons and synapses must create thoughts as complex as our own. Or more so. And yet blue whales struggle to survive as a species in a world degraded by human beings. I am thinking of that brain and I am not ready yet to say farewell to the tribe of whales.
 . 
Chapel Hill cartoonist Keith Knight draws a weekly panel titled (th)ink. Today’s is a portrait of and quotation by James Baldwin (1924-1987): “To be a Negro in this country & to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Human being who is relatively conscious, choose your own rage focal point du jour – human beings caged like animals in a Florida concentration camp; children intentionally starved to advance a particular political agenda; boosting fossil fuels burned to appease a few billionaires; an ocean filled with plastic nanoparticles and deafening human vibrations where blue whales may soon be extinct? Some days I feel like I am not ready to go on living. Some days I am more than ready to say goodbye to the tribe of humans. In a few years I will depart as an inhabitant of planet Earth. Some years after that the last memory of my having been an inhabitant will finally depart as well. On that day, will any whales still remain to swim the depths? Will any love between humans remain, or any love for other creatures? I am not ready yet to answer.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
October Valentine
 . 
A heart-shaped leaf spied in the weeds on my walk
down the hill to the mailbox. I didn’t see a redbud tree
 . 
on the roadside, so it must have lifted on the wind
and dropped – a gift! – near my feet. Is it a message
 . 
from someone I love – my sweet mother in a halo of light,
my father singing the names of trees in his strong baritone?
 . 
Or is it from someone I’ve never seen and may never meet?
 . 
As I hike up the hill, I tuck the leaf in my pocket, rubbing it
with my thumb – as if I could read it – skin to skin – by osmosis.
 . 
Halfway home, I stop to study it. Cerise with splotches of green,
dark spots, a wormhole bored like a bullet wound, a battered
 . 
heart, like yours, like mine, but maybe its scars make it more
beautiful than before. My friends, there’s still so much
 . 
love in this world even when you’re alone.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Is it strange for me to be toying with despair while reading a book of healing and love like Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart? Actually, if you’re not toying with despair you are the strange one. Give grudging thanks, though. Thank the stars and the mysterious hemlocks and the dark fecund earth that in a world full of rage and despair there are poems like Beth Copeland’s. These poems know the feeling of being lost in endless night. These poems have been battered, they have fallen, they have doubted plenty of times whether there is any wholeness or healing available to them, but these poems stand up to testify, My friends, there’s still so much love in this world even when you’re alone.
 . 
Often I tell myself it is ridiculous to imagine that any sort of inner peace is possible. I have my share of personal regrets and ongoing grief, and even though I’m tempted to look around and envy those people who don’t, when I’m really honest I admit that no one escapes whipping. But peace can’t be a wall built around my sadness – walls keep more things in than out. Despair is inevitable. How foolish is it, then, and how strange, to spend a few hours with a book of words arranged in lines on paper and discover the tightness in my throat is easing? The mountain has rested in one place for 480 million; today its peak is less than a third of its height when it was first thrust up in the big crunch. Does it reflect on loss and diminishment, or does it find peace in the weight of its daily being? Am I inflamed and scarred by the revelations of Beth Copeland’s battles and pain, or am I grateful for her gratitude and strengthened by her strength?
 . 
The tribe of human beings seems determined to destroy itself. The tribe of human beings seems determined to link arms and hearts in love. Perhaps discovering a moment of beauty is not a cowardly attempt to escape dire reality – perhaps it is the only thing capable of healing us.
 . 
❦
 . 
Explore REDHAWK Publications, including Beth Copeland’s I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart and Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of the Peak HERE.
 . 
Sample poems from Shibori Blue at Verse & Image HERE.
 . 
More information about the North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences HERE.
Dive into the K Chronicles with Keith Knight HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
My Daughter Paints a Mountain
 . 
She wasn’t thinking as her brush swept
across canvas in wave-length strokes,
 . 
channeling a crest she’d never seen,
while I was still in the Sandhills
 . 
where there aren’t any hills, just fields
of cotton, soybeans, and cedar stumps
 . 
in swamp water, sleeping on an air mattress
in a small apartment with prints and paintings
propped against walls instead of hung,
newly separated, newly sober, living
 . 
between the husband and home I’d left
and a haven I hadn’t found yet.
 . 
*****
 . 
As I drove up a steep road to see a house
in the Blue Ridge, a large buck leapt
 . 
in front of the car to welcome me,
and I knew I’d found my new home.
 . 
I didn’t know the mountain seen at the top
of the hill was the mountain she’d painted
 . 
months before, and she didn’t know I’d move
to that house with a view of the mountain
 . 
she’d painted as if in a dream or fugue.
How could her mountain – purple, lavender,
 . 
pink, and forest green swirled to a peak
with white streak of snow against a blue sky –
 . 
mirror the one framed in my window?
Was it coincidence or synchronicity
 . 
that the mountain in her mind’s
eye was more map than metaphor?
 . 
It was a message from the universe:
You’re home. Open the door.
 . 
Beth Copeland
from I Ask the Mountain to Heal My Heart, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2025
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
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❦ ❦ ❦
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1074 Marcia Road

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 11, 2025| 6 Comments »

IMG_4192_crop

Albert Mountain Sunrise

 . 
[with 3 poems by Kathy Ackerman]
 . 
Heritage Lost
 . 
Hills are keening,
yellowed voices of serious photos
call me home to “precious memories,
how they linger,
how they ever flood my soul.”
 . 
How in a displaced caravan
we went to lay her down
in shining soil,
flecks of coal on shovels
in the hills of familiar gravestones.
It had to be that church,
that pastor’s family name,
Rock of Ages, Beulah Land.
 . 
How odd to call it home and feel it so
without a waiting bed of down
to follow the wake,
all of us gone north for good,
except for this.
 . 
How we walked between
the railroad and the shallow ditch
collecting tadpoles in a pail
we’d flush in the motel’s aqua bathroom
because I would not understand.
Death, a newborn slippery thing.
 . 
How the stone had to be a heart
to bear the name of Mother,
how the heart had to be a stone
to be left behind
in its rightful place
in the hills near the church
near the home place bought by strangers.
 . 
We packed the memories once again
in bursting overnight bags,
left the motel beds unmade,
because we could
and settled into our procession.
CB radios, Thermoses, Styrofoam,
we headed back up north
to our factories, unions, high schools,
without looking backward.
 . 
Kathy Ackerman
from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Where is home? Is it a house number, 1074 Marcia Road, a side yard, fence, and oak tree I can still see as clearly as when I was 10? I could walk right through the carport sixty years later and show you exactly where we buried my hamster. Or is home a garage full of cardboard boxes and bric-a-brac from four other homes of parents and grandparents, houses you only spent a few dozens of nights in altogether? Is home the towns those houses occupied? The states?  Whose home is your home? Whose place is yours?
 . 
I was barely four when we moved from Niagara Falls to Memphis. Not until years later was I able to piece together the stories of my parents’ migration, how they drifted together across those red clay counties of piedmont North Carolina, then pinballed via Atlanta to New York before birthing me. All my solid early childhood memories abide in those eight years in Shelby County, Tennessee, that little four-square subdivision on the outskirts of Memphis.
 . 
Then we moved. And moved again. The sixth graders in Delaware mimicked my accent and immediately nicknamed me “Memphis.” It doesn’t take long for a 12-year old to figure out how important it is to fit in. For the next couple decades I can now see that I lived as if the place I was staying would never be the place I stayed.
 . 
Here in the rural South, when you meet someone new question number one is not, “What do you do?” but, “Where are you from?” One longs to fit in; one doesn’t want to whack the conversation with an axe by replying, “New York.” I invented my stock answer right quick: “Both of my parents are from North Carolina.” Subtext: “I want to be from North Carolina. I want you to let me be.”
 . 
I have now lived exactly 70% of my entire lifespan in North Carolina. NC driver’s license, NC property taxes, kids born in NC, grandkids too. Maybe being almost from here is an advantage. Every new state park we visit, every historical factoid, every endemic flower species I learn, every third generation progeny of a friend I greet while out walking – I tally them all securely in my calculus of belonging. Way back when Linda and I arrived in Durham a week after we’d married, a month before I started med school at Duke, we just assumed that in four years we’d be moving back to Ohio to be closer to her huge family. Now it’s been fifty-one years in The Old North State, forty-four of those in rural Elkin in rural Surry County. Lately we’ve started talking about downsizing, moving somewhere we can age in place through to the end of our allotted spans. Linda says, “You know where I’d really like to live?” Oh my God, is Ohio still calling her? Is the place we’ve been staying never to be the place we stay? She looks at me level, no joking here. “Winston-Salem.”
 . 
Well, I guess we are from North Carolina. It’s nice to be home.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Cul-de-sac
 . 
From Coal River Road to White Mist Lane
is more than forty years,
several hundred miles
as the crow truly flies, one point to another,
and sometimes back,
no straighter than a crooked river
wrecked by mines.
 . 
Here the landscapers claw in stony earth
to sow some seed
while wings of straw fly it away.
My lawn’s a futile thing
where rocks and trees should be.
 . 
I stoop to gather stubborn stones,
pretend I do it for the grass,
but in their quartz and granite peaks
admittedly ground to bits by time
I find the mountain of my blood
and hear the ancient syllables spilled,
silenced now by cul-de-sac
and swaying Mylar storks,
a neighborhood of strangers
increasing overnight.
 . 
Kathy Ackerman
from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Linda spots the book on top of my pile, next in queue for reading, and its title speaks right up and makes its demands known. “We need to save this one for Jodi.” Who was born in Ohio but lives in coal country, and whose career has been to tell its stories as naturalist and interpreter in the New River Gorge near Beckley, WV. Indeed, I’ll share it with Jodi, this book I bought from a friend whose poetry I’ve admired for many years, whom I’ve come to know better through the North Carolina Poetry Society Board, and whose more recent book I featured here three years ago. Now I open the book, though, and out spill the connections and intersections. Kathy, just up the road there at Isothermal Community College, I never realized we’ve come from the same place!
 . 
Kathy Ackerman grew up in Ohio (like me, at least from 8th grade on) far from her birthplace and her family’s heritage. In later years she has mainly visited the old home state for funerals, but the landscapes, place names, family memories, and fortunes (or lack thereof) of West Virginia are the palette from which she paints these poems of Coal River Road. This collection is yearning for home, but home is something slippery and out of reach. A bright fleck in a stone might remind her of the mountain in her blood, but returning to stand on the that mountain she discovers a hint of strangeness and regret. Perhaps the yearning itself is home, the uprooted and cast adrift feeling that keeps a person looking for something solid, for something that means.
 . 
I identify with these poems. Kathy uses imagery and memory not just to disclose the past but to define the present. She can only be the person she is because she’s traveled the twisting roadways through old hollers and coves as well as the West Virginia Turnpike straight up to Ohio’s new sown lawns. And finally I-77 South. Although Kathy Ackerman didn’t settle in this state until a full ten years after I did, I can assure you that she is from North Carolina.
 . 
❦
 . 
Coal River Road by Kathy Ackerman is available from Livingston Press. Her more recent book is Repeat After Me from Redhawk Publications (2022).
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Whitesville, WV
 . 
Because we never had the conversation
I am following a hearse that winds
down Coal River Road toward Whitesville.
 . 
How to say irrational to bury you here
in the only land we own outright,
owned for generations
though none of us can visit your grave
in less than a day.
 . 
These plots foreshadow the ending
no matter the story you wanted to tel.
you never wanted to return, like this or not.
 . 
You’d cringe to see this dingy place,
smelling of rot as if what remains
of the Big Coal River
seeps in each night while the corpses await
their faraway bereaved.
 . 
For once, I’m relieved to by unromantic.
That body is merely a souvenir
a keepsake – you wore it every day.
Symbol. Skin. Form.
 . 
I am relieved to know you’re not really here
though there’s nowhere else for us to go
to pay our respects. It is not respect
that brought you here, but silence,
the failure to make a better plan
because you never learned to say goodbye.
 . 
Kathy Ackerman
from Coal River Road, Livingston Press, The university of West Alabama; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
Doughton Park Tree 2020-09-08b

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Speaking with the Dead

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2025| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joan Barasovska]
 . 
The Box
 . 
They are quiet in their photographs,
my mother’s dead.
 . 
They speak to me, entreat me to explain.
 . 
A magnifying glass held to their fading faces
proves scant help.
 . 
To listen, I must listen to myself,
to memory.
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
To speak with the dead, one must listen to oneself.
 . 
Before my mother died we talked about dying. Her dying. When I helped her fill out the living will forms. Before the first visit from the palliative care nurse. As her health took yet another sudden stepwise decline. I asked her, not at all for the first time, “Do you want to go to the doctor? To the hospital?” “No. No.” And then we didn’t talk about it any more.
 . 
Instead we talked with the dead. Some people approaching the end of their life close themselves off. They draw the veil about their diminishment and turn inward. My mother, though, turned outward, like a great flower that slowly pivots throughout the day to face the sun. Like one of those giant radio telescopes that can hear the earliest whispers of creation, she became a passive receptor who welcomed anything anyone desired to bring her. I brought her the dead.
 . 
Photographs of the dead. Some were in antique frames, some dropping from ancient scrapbooks, most of them loose in envelopes or the bottom of cartons. She and I collected them all into a grand new album and along the way we told each other stories. “Isn’t that Lucy and Ted just married? Linda and I met them at Nana’s reunion 50 years ago. And there’s you with Lucy, both teenagers. Now here’s Carlyle in the little car Grandpop built for him. I guess it was already obvious he’d be crazy for cars the rest of his life.”
 . 
Some stories she told me; some I imagined while she fingered the photos and nodded in silence. At the moment of shutterclick, each photo was created within its world of vast significance. Those worlds dissipate, decrescendo in brilliance like photons that have traveled light-years to reach our eyes, red-shifted with distance in an expanding universe. But during those moments together my mother could enter their world and hear them, the dead, their voices.
 . 
Next month it will have been a year since my mother exhaled her last breath. Her living essence has joined the whispers of the cosmos. Her essence still lives in me and all who knew her and who have not yet joined the dead. Yesterday I found a photo Grandpop took of Mom at age 10 surrounded by her wonderful collection of dolls. There it is, that hint of a smile on her lips, in her eyes, the joyful teasing hint I have seen in person a million times. But looking at that photo is not when I miss her most. The pang of absence strikes me most sharply when a random question pops into my head: “Did you have boy friends before Dad? What was it like to be living 500 miles from Nana and Grandpop when I was born? Who is that standing behind you in this photo?”
 . 
Some of the questions I may once have asked but don’t recall her answers. Most are questions it never occurred to me to ask while we were together on the earth. Now when I pull that grand album off the shelf, her picture will also be among those gone mute. But not completely so. Memory tangles and untangles itself to create new stories. I will listen to my heart. I am now the one who must speak with the dead.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In Shul on Rosh Hashonah
 . 
Elizabeth is home with the baby; Ben sits beside his sons
on the hard bench. All three wear yarmulkes, Ben is draped
in his tallis – Reuben and Joseph are too young. The black
straps of tefillin tightly encircle his left hand and arm;
the boxes press into his forehead and bicep.
 . 
The drone of men praying, the vibrato of the old rebbe raised
above their voices, the distant murmur and rustle of women
and girls in the balcony above, and Ben’s own chanted Hebrew,
eyes closed, davening deeply – all are as necessary and familiar
as his heart’s beats and his quiet breaths.
 . 
His boys can barely wait for the blowing of the shofar,
the twisted, ridged ram’s horn the see near the ark.
Ben hears Joe whisper to Rube, “When?” and Rube’s loud
“Shush!” Ben is clean-shaven, unlike the older men. He goes
daily to Boris Adelman, the barber on 21st Street, who keeps
a chin mug painted with his name, Benjamin Nax, on a shelf.
His disc of soap, his ivory brush. Boris strops the razor on a
lng leather strap It’s sinful to let his mind wander like this
on a Day of Awe. He gives thanks for his children: Rube,
a little man; Joseph, their angel. now Elsie.
 . 
He was once a boy sitting with is father and grandfathers
in shul. His chest hollows around their absence. They could easily
be dead, and his uncles and mother, lined up to be shot on the
edge of a ditch. No wisdom from grandfathers for his boys.
 . 
The cantor raised the shofar to his lips and fills his lungs.
Joe has fallen asleep leaning against him, and starts awake at the
first blast. Intervals of blast and chant: Tekia! Sevarim! T’ruah!
Renew our days! Mercy is aroused! Judgement is removed!
Reverberating in the small chilly building, this uncanny sound
of the desert, the First Temple, the shtetl, and the ninety-nine
synagogues of Minsk.
 . 
Ben takes his boys’ hands, and the three are surrounded
on the sidewalk by greetings: L’shonah tovah! Gut yontif!
A gut gebentsht yor! It isn’t his name, Benjamin Nax.
It was changed at Ellis Island, from Binyomin Nakhimovsky.
What is there to believe, in America?
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 .  .  .  .  . 
Love flares in the sleeper’s dream,
blue as a Sabbath candle flame, warm as
the kitchen of her grandmother’s house.
from Elizabeth’s Travels
 . 
Her story begins in cruelty concealed and unspoken. It wends its way through hardship and regret, between guilt and resentment. It ends as it started, in death. But that is not all. That is only one harsh thread of the story. The story feeds itself with family love and devotion. It clings to hope in darkness. The story opens its pages because of the expansive heart of the one who desires to be its guardian, its intrepid explorer, its teller. Thus the journey of Unblessed, Unsung by Joan Barasovska.
 . 
There is a bit of mountain trail that winds across a mile or two of bald slopes at Bluff Ridge along the Blue Ridge Parkway. If the summer grass has grown waist high and the cows have not been pastured there this season, the trail is obscured, untraceable except for this: in the 1930’s, the Civilian Conservation Corps placed concrete markers, posts two feet tall, to guide the hiker along the path. Joan has found her own waypoints to reveal her own path into her past: a few fading sepia photographs; recollections written down by cousins; conversations with a last survivor. To these she has applied the poet’s toolkit, observation and imagination, to render this book and bring it to life.
 . 
Some of the questions Joan must ask about her grandparents have discernable answers. Where did they grow up? What year did they arrive in America? But many answers are as intangible as smoke from an extinguished candle and as difficult to clasp. Joan uses what clues she can amass – a facial expression in an old photo; a fragment of tale from a distant cousin – to build an enlarging picture. If we don’t always know exactly how this man and that woman felt, at least we know that they did feel and we can hope to project their circumstances into our own dilemmas and responses. Considering another person’s memories is a fruitful impetus to reliving our own memories. At the beginning of Unblessed, Unsung Joan quotes Zora Neale Hurston: There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. Here is a story borne and bared. May these poems now weave and tangle more stories, a never-completed tapestry.
 . 
❦
 . 
Joan Barasovska lives in Orange County, North Carolina, USA, and has authored three previous poetry collections. Unblessed, Unsung is available from MAIN STREET RAG.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Listen
 . 
If I told you I hear their voices
in the apartment on Christian Street,
would you visit there with me?
 . 
At the table where they take their meals,
or by the stove, where Elizabeth stands,
adding potatoes to stretch a soup?
 . 
Between husband and wife,
what heat, what chill, what
balance of force and yield?
 . 
The rooms are scrubbed raw-clean,
it’s crowded, voices are raised,
the three children witness everything.
 . 
It’s a time before parents learned
to safeguard childhood. If I told you I hear
cruelty, in word if not in deed, trust me.
 . 
Joan Barasovska
from Unblessed, Unsung, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
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