V E R S E and I M A G E

Rain so long

the dusty pink bucket

outside the basement brims

and a puny squirrel floats

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ face down.

I dig a hole in the azalea bed

near the stair well. The ground splits

++++ into a glove

++++ ++++ with root threads for fingers.

++++ ++++ ++++ I trickle

++++ ++++ ++++ the bucket into its palm.

++++ ++++ The runt’s round stare catches the sun.

I cover the fuzzy ribs. Close the glove. Smooth

++++ the hole. ++++ Bless the soul

++++ ++++ in case

++++ there’s somewhere else.

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025

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Perhaps bedtime reading infiltrates one’s dreams. I selected this particular book imagining it might hold the secret, and then hold that secret out to me in revelation: Where is God? Was I wrong to expect to find God in a book, when pretty much everything else I’ve ever wanted to find was in books? Or if the thing itself is not in a book at least the book is able to make the thing comprehensible, graspable, whole. Oh my, how that word creeps in, whole. I had read this author’s contemplations about becoming one’s complete and perfect self, wholly connected and part of the universe which is God, and now here I am halfway through her book, whose theme is “relational holism.”

But where am I really? These woods are dark and close. I can’t quite see what is screeching high up amidst the branches, but it sounds like quantum entanglement and Jungian archetypes. Assuming I do wake in the morning, I will recall snatches of dreams about trying to put things together that refuse to fit. Long halls and which of these closed doors is the one I’m meant to open? Being surrounded by people I could swear I should know but who don’t know me.

The title of this microessay is Manipulative Intelligence, subtitle The Paradox of a Trillion Synapses. Consider me a wholly average representative of my genus and species. I can read without glasses as long as the light is bright, but I can’t see remotely as well at distance as a hawk or as an owl at midnight. I can smell bread baking but the remainder of the world’s vast olfactory tapestry of edibles which is plain as the nose on a bear’s face is inscrutable to me. I can hear a C minor chord sung by a competent quartet but the deer can hear me coming a concert hall away. And I can’t imagine that those huge cetaceans with their massive cerebral cortices are thinking whalethoughts any less profound than my humanthoughts. What does that leave, then, to account for the relentless invasive proliferation of persons, for 9 billion homo sapiens infesting the earth?

Manipulative intelligence is the inborn gift of fiddling with things. Manual fiddling progresses to building machines capable of even bigger and faster fiddling. If there is one trait that makes humans unique, it is that we have fiddled with, changed, and are continuing to alter our surroundings. Not just for protection or dwelling, bowerbirds and beeswax, but we have manipulated our entire biosphere. The venture capitalists say, “Way to go!” while the rest of us who live on Planet Earth, including the hawks and owls and bears and deer and whales and bowerbirds and bees, say “What the fuck!” But here’s the paradox: besides imagining that our big heads are a fiddling gift, we also contend that our trillion+ synapses have made us the only creatures capable of encountering the Giver. And something about the way our limbic systems interconnect with our frontal lobes has also convinced us that we are God’s favorite.

Back to my book and my dreams. A hundred more pages of Ilia Delio to go. I promise I’ll make it to the finish line. To God. I will lie back and let Carl Jung sort out my dreams. Meanwhile this morning has presented a rare couple of hours with absolutely no prescribed fiddlings. Sitting on the porch while the house wren lets everyone in earshot know he has a nest and a mate here, while the beech and maple deepen the shade across the deck slats minute by minute, while I hold my notebook on my lap but don’t get another line written beyond Trillion Synapses, I’m thinking. Empty thoughts with no script or outline and no polysyllabic labels. Non-fiddling thoughts. I think Ilia is right. God is not out there. God is in here.

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The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole by Ilia Delio, O.S.F. Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY. © 2023

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Once on a cruise,

my mother spent the week

not letting my father find her.

Behind a book,

hunkered in a deck chair,

she would see him coming

and dash starboard

then dash again if need be.

She thought him ridiculous

disco dancing at 70,

his shorts and tube socks.

Why couldn’t he just read?

His second wife

insisted on his cremation

and I imagined my father

dancing into flames.

Now my mother

rolls alone under

the grass and plastic flowers

of a double plot, bought

too soon.

She draws the soil

up under her chin

but still does not miss him.

She wonders what will happen

to the space beside her.

She would not mind

if someone else moved in,

perhaps someone sensible,

someone who reads.

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025

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I treasure my memories of Tar River Poetry founding editor Peter Makuck. I met him first and formally through rejection letters, as kind as any, and later an occasional acceptance, O Frabjous Day! Later yet we met in person a few times at statewide poetry meetings. Bit by bit we discovered many more things in common – Ohio and Kent State, Bogue Banks, birding – and also shared more poetry with each other. I featured a poem by Peter during my tenure as Poet in Residence at the NC Zoo. Several times a year he would send me a poem he’d discovered that he thought I’d appreciate. And of course I was reading everything Peter published.

Peter Makuck was a truly generous and warm person. And creative, and insightful, and true. I am thankful to Advisory Editor Luke Whisnant for furthering the work Peter began at Tar River Poetry, and I am very grateful to the newest Editors, Charmaine Cadeau and Helena Feder, for Volume 64 Number 2. And here’s a shout out to everyone else whose name appears inside the front cover:

Advisory Board: Chris Abani, Alice Allan, Stephanie Bolster, Jane Hirshfield, Brandon Krieg, Dorianne Laux, Amit Majmudar, Matthew Buckley Smith

Interns: Onyx Bradley, Rebecca Donaldson, Paige Osché (hey Onyx, I’m the one who took that photo of you presenting at the NC Museum of Art in 2023 and sent to John Hoppenthaler)

Peter Makuck, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University, died in 2023 at the age of 83.

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I should say it aloud, Don’t listen to me, one more old man

++ rebuking the younger

as old people will, a man half ashamed to be partway

++ launched into unspoken rant

just now by the sound – of all things on earth – of a nearby

++ pileated woodpecker

in awakening hardwoods behind the house, a sound that

++ occasions my own yen to squawk

at some innocent I see only in mind, Take out those Air Pods

++ or whatever they’re called

and hear this beat, pure percussion, granted, no music

++ beyond its simple tock

but somehow entailing a tune because, as Keats, though

++ himself no more than a stripling,

so rightly noted, Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard /

++ Are sweeter,

and true enough, that red-crowned bird offers up its song

++ without singing,

song of those hardwoods soon to burst into their million

++ shades of green,

of the ducklike calls from the pondside wood frogs, of

++ actual ducks, and so on and on.

Listen! I shout in silence, that tock contriving for us the

++ springtime dream

we’ll wake from, sadly, and into which so many have never

++ fallen, really,

and can’t, what with shells and mortars raking the world and

++ lethal airplanes aloft –

not like the two fabulous peregrine falcons racing this morning

++ majestically

across our lawn: no, not like bombers and drones that mob

++ the sky like bees –

no, not like bees that wills warm here soon, as the

++ woodpecker’s unheard strains declare

while I rebuke some unknown someone, and the soundless,

++ song may in fact scold me,

a man, judgmental, self-centered, who dares, in the midst of

++ all this abundance, to suffer

his thirst for more and looks around for even more, on the

++ verge of tears,

thrusting up his springtime lust as some old-fashioned

++ cartoon beggar

might hold up his cup – which may mean the man has

++ simply been wrong in this censure here

of the one or ones he’s conjured and cursed, and might have

++ done better with fingers in ears.

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 64 Number 2, Spring 2025

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