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Archive for the ‘Imagery’ Category

Prepare to Meet

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on June 16, 2011| 5 Comments »

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.
Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.

You’ve seen signs like the one I’m talking about.  Hand-printed, fervent, a little threatening – probably intentionally so.  You might expect to encounter one only on the winding back lanes a healthy stretch removed from “civilization,” but no, keep your eyes open.  The one I’m thinking of is right on 21 between Roaring Gap and State Road, the heavily traveled route we all take to the Parkway.  Black on white, just a little crude:  “Prepare to Meet Thy God.”

Well, now that’s just silly.  Meet God here?  Not likely, unless He or She knows how to text.  OK, that’s a pretty lame joke.  If God shows up we won’t expect the great I AM to be wearing a robe and speaking Aramaic; if God wants to text me, God certainly will.  No, it’s not technology that’s the barrier, it’s that I am just way too busy to greet God right now.  Aren’t we all?

I guess I thought I was, until I read Rebecca Baggett’s chapbook, God Puts on the Body of a Deer.  Many of the poems are contemplative: they invite me to retreat from the clamor and just ponder for a moment.  But many more plunk me down right in the middle of the incessant mindstream and preoccupation we call “life” and smack me with a sign that seems to say, “Prepare to Meet.”

Not unlike Mary in Annunciation, kneading the dough, hair in her eyes, back aching when . . . suddenly the angel appears, / wingtips quivering, / shimmering like a dragonfly / in the light from one window. // The angel names her, / his voice tender, merciless.  The paradox stops me in my tracks. Tender; merciless.  My God is a being of infinite love and mercy, but wait.  Maybe faith is not a get out of jail free card.  Maybe there’s a reciprocal expectation.  Should I be taking a little more time to listen?  Should I be preparing?

Should I be reading Rebecca’s book more often?

My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

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Annunciation

The girl’s sleeves are rolled
to her elbows, her hands sticky
with dough.  She pushes wisps
of hair from her eyes
with her forearm, yawns,
eases her aching back,
and suddenly the angel appears,
wingtips quivering,
shimmering like a dragonfly
in the light from the one window.

The angel names her,
his voice tender, merciless.
Mary gasps aloud, fingers brushing frantically
at constellations of flour
scattered across her skirt.

There must be some mistake,
she wants to protest, flinching
from the messenger’s luminous face,
his fervent, adoring eyes.
You want some other girl.
Finer.  Kinder to her mother.
Someone stronger, strong enough
to bear . . .

But already she has consented, altered,
speared in a shaft of light,
her breath surging in her ears
while something unearthly
stirs inside her.  Already
the swept dirt floor, the rough-
hewn table, the clay pitcher,
beaded with water-drops,
the new-shaped loaves, still bearing
her hand’s imprint,
have receded,
distinct and distant
as if she had traveled as far
from home as Egypt.  As far as that.

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[from God Puts on the Body of a Deer, Rebecca Baggett, Winner of the 2010 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest]

More poems by Rebecca Baggett

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Storms: Hide in the Basement or Ride the Lightning

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’m fourteen and I need a new pair of pants (the Aurora High dress code states “no blue jeans”). My dad drives me to Solon to the men’s store. I am not feeling at all like a man when I consider walking up to the clerk in his jacket and tie and asking for help finding what I need. I don’t even know how to describe what I need, much less do I have the intestinal fortitude to ask for it. My mouth is dry. Everyone in the place (all two of them) is staring at me. What a dork! Then my dad walks in and says three words to the clerk who points to a rack. Dad pulls down a couple of pairs, holds them up to my scrawny frame, sends me into the fitting room. They’re OK. He pays and we drive home. DAMN, my Dad can do anything!
When I was thirty-eight and shopping with my fourteen-year old son, I walked up to the clerk and asked how to find the pants. And I was convinced everyone in the place thought I was a dork. But then I suddenly realized my son couldn’t tell I felt like a dork. He must have thought I knew what I was doing. And then I thought maybe my Dad always felt like a dork and was never really filled with the confidence I always sensed exuding from him. And now I’m fifty-eight and still feel like a dork, but I’ve at least reached the point where I don’t always care whether people think I’m one or not. [OK, OK, until later, when the retrospectoscope clicks on and I think, “Why the hell did I say that? What a dork!”]
Which doesn’t have a thing to do with this poem by Annalee Kwochka. Or maybe it does. In her premier book, Seventeen, Annalee includes endnotes that explain the moment in 8th grade when she suddenly realized her parents didn’t have themselves figured out any better than she did. When your idols are suddenly discovered to be human and fallible, do you hate them for it? Or is that the moment when you really first begin to love them?
And now I’m recalling Annalee reading from her book at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities last month. Poised, beautiful, expressive, honest. Her piercing skill with words, her entangling extended metaphors, how she reveals a depth to the teenage psyche I didn’t know we former-teenagers ever possessed. Totally non-dorky. But still I wonder – did she go home that night and think, “Why the hell did I say that?!” I hope not. I hope there’s one person on the planet that feels completely at home in who they are and who they’re becoming.
Oh, and postscript to my son: does it help to know that your old man who carries a stethoscope and writes poems and knows the Latin names of things is really still, at heart, a dork?

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 Storms
for my mother
You, with your
Mouth drawn tight and your fingers
Fast on the keyboard, you seem
So lost in your own private storm.
You can’t feel the winds that rip
From your mouth, scarcely notice the
Words they carry.

Do you dance
In your own rain?
Once while spinning
On the warm summer sidewalk, I
Watched the chalk-pictures drain their rainbow
Through my pink-painted toes,
And thought I might have glimpsed
A little happiness.

Do you sing louder
Than your own thunder?
When I was swinging in a spring
Thunderstorm, I let my voice seek the
Bluebirds and their bright feathers, the ground
Falling from under my mud-stained feet as song
Lifted me through that crack in the storm
Where the sun seeps through.
And I found
A silver lining
In the angry, tight-pulled words
That brought me out into a summer storm,
Wishing you were here with me.

from SEVENTEEN by Annalee Kwochka, (c) 2010
For information, contact Running Poet Press
RunningPoet17@gmail.com

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Annalee Kwochka won first prize in the 2005 NC Poetry Society student contest for lyrical poety (grades 3-8) for her poem Window Seat at the City Bakery, and she has been accumulating kudos ever since.  This fall she’ll matriculate in Davidson College’s creative writing program.

SEVENTEEN reviewed by Scott Owens 

Mona Lisa Muse by Annalee Kwochka, won first prize in the 2008 NCPS student contest

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Traces

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2011| 2 Comments »

Linda’s sister Jodi is a National Park Service ranger in the New River Gorge.  In addition to some of her jobs like cultural and historical interpretation, wildflower walks, and storytelling, she’s also a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School: she teaches people visiting the backcountry to Leave No Trace.

Is it really possible to leave no trace of your passing?  Whether it’s an afternoon in the Greensboro Arboretum or ten days on the AT, can you really return from a place with no evidence you were ever there?  In years past the NPS and other outdoor organizations had less ambitious slogans:  Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires; Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute; Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Footprints; Pack It In, Pack It Out.  But no trace at all?!  Even if all six billion of us recycled, composted, and travelled everywhere we went via shank’s mare, just the act of breathing in and out sends billows of carbon dioxide like a blanket into the atmosphere.  Leave No Trace — are you kidding me?

I wrote this poem, little mouse (trace), with my son and daughter in mind.  At different times one or the other of them has taken extended wilderness treks with me, and we’ve struggled to practice the best stewardship over wild places that we can.  (Margaret’s famous quotation upon reaching a road crossing with a refuse bin and over a pound of garbage in her pack:  “Trash cans rock my world!”)  But the world I want to leave them is not one with a few nice paths through the woods free of candy wrappers.  It’s not just the expectation that a few hikers will know how to erase the marks of their stay when they break camp.  It’s more like some crazy hope that all of us, every one, will retain an acute awareness of our traces right in the very places where we live.  That we’ll regret the unavoidable scars we leave on the earth.  That we’ll celebrate together when we can heal one.

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little mouse
(trace)

I want to leave the earth and climb
the snowbank cumulus, kick
my boots into the billow, lean
against my sassafras stick and rise.
Rain licks the slickrock clean

of my prints, greenbriar weaves
wild drapery up the wall, hickory sprouts
through the sidewalk.  I want to leave
no trace of my passing, no more trail
than the cursive of a slender tail

in dew.  Morning sun drinks that cup
and learns a word I never spoke,
someone’s new word for love.  I
want to be no more I but we – creature
loam bud feather; let roots translate

the phosphorus of my dust to fruit.
If you look for me a wren calls.
If you listen the poplar turns to honey
in the sky.  Drink deep this cup.  I want
to leave the earth to you.

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[from little mouse, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2011]

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