V E R S E and I M A G E

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall

be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

— John 10:9

To brave the vale, to spread its curtain,

like my father on the hillock of his final pass,

our common purgatory. My father, who fingers

my knuckles with one hand, counts the abacus

of my backbone with the other. We’re in a waiting

period, he says is if to apparitions come

for the main event, time is winding down.

Nothing in my own life matters, not that I share

his descent on shards of marriage vows,

that I roam the sheepfold in search of oasis.

Only that the weather is good or overcast,

lunch is coming or done. We sit skin to skin,

as never before, his hands the picture of his mother’s.

Maybe she’s the one in white organdy, her hair

still strawberry blond, tapping her ladies’ Bulova:

Lordy, how the time goes. Maybe she’s the shepherd

disguised, the one who lies down at the mouth

of thievery, both door and gatekeeper for the huddled

bleating. Let us enter the door without pleading

or birthright and be known by the one, the voice

leading us in and out to find pasture,

fingers woven at our breast so weary from being

and trying, so strayed we can only be gathered.

from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019

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Strange the great presence in absence—

book I remembered on the second shelf

of the red bookcase, next to Flannery

and Ole Fred, rounding the corner to bare

wall, or brushing my left hand, indentation

on the ring finger from years of gold.

The mind plays tricks, clasps the gilt frame

if imagined life even after the moving truck

with his furniture barrels off, even after

I sit shiva with my grief, days unraveled

partly by my own device, and I have, thread

by knotty thread, woven a new silken skin.

Ghost pain, phantom pain, a limb lopped

clean, the dead bee’s sting. We are good

amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards,

regenerating feet and tails in the shadows

where no one watches us spin and weep,

where no one sees me turn a corner

in the dark before bed, giving wide berth,

my body’s radar still beeping and flashing

to sidestep a bookcase no longer there.

from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019

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The inner work must be done in the well

of drawer among pebbled buttons kept

for whenever, lavender sachets spilling

their guts, Grandmama’s cat’s-eye glasses,

my pride pierced on her pincushion.

Only there can I sift what hangs loose

on my shoulders, the stained, the torn,

crocheted illusories never seeing

light of day. Keys to nowhere, Irish

pence, the pocket Psalms and Proverbs

have no providence, no commerce

in my wilderness, though I rub each

faux pearl as talisman, the Long Nights Moon

heartsick at my window. Strayed, undone

in the layers, I dig to the bottom, wooden

thud that nips my heel, turns me to the field

of what never emptied in the first place,

not bargain or plea but steppingstones,

uneaten breadcrumbs, one then another.

Buckeye and amethyst still harbor luck.

Old stockings will do for garden stakes,

for spring coming sure.

from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019

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What we truly lose – is it possible that is something different from what we think we’ve lost? The love of so many years now parted, disdaining; the beloved parent now departed, buried. Who wouldn’t be shattered to pieces? Who wouldn’t doubt in any power to restore?

Linda Parson’s poems do not skip lightly across the landscape of grief. She stabs her fingers into the cold clay and wrestles with the spiky roots. Stiffened and wearied along with her, we ourselves wonder if there is any hope that warmth may return. Loss is not defeated but confirmed, in all its guises of loneliness and disruption. But we also accompany the poet into her intentional silence. She will release the past from strangling her present, from projecting her future. Perhaps what she thinks she has lost does threaten her with the loss of hope, the loss of joy. With the loss of the inner knowledge that spring comes sure. But then she turns to the field of what never emptied in the first place, and there she finds a way back. A path. Steppingstones. She is not truly lost.

Candescent is a glowing meadow with all its messy diversity of creatures and themes. Vines and briers may twine and choke, but full fecund life grows strong through the past into the present. Life will not be overcome. This collection of poems, colorful and fragrant, affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Struggle and pain are part of us but do not make us. I take encouragement from the poet’s words: Let dead be dead . . . return, to cress beneath your feet, return to real and true.

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Linda Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame and has served as the Poet Laureate of Knoxville. She will be poetry instructor at the 2026 Tremont Writers Conference in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her bio at The Poetry Foundation is available HERE; her fifth poetry collection, Candescent, is available from IRIS PRESS.

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