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Square Foot

Posted in Imagery on September 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with 5 poems by Bradley Strahan]

Repeatable Pleasures

A lawn of families;

beach house, beach clothes,

each evening a glissando

of guitar pulling down the sun.

Down to the sea we run,

the gulls waving to us;

this year, next year,

our interchangeable faces.

Our interchangeable places:

flashy beach house,

seaworn motel, not one

here just two decades ago.

Here until the next big blow

takes it all back,

a wavebeat,

between two stormfronts.

Still we hope for those scents

of another summer, salt tang

and iced coffee; the clang of horseshoes

and one more beer, one more wave to ride.

Yes, here’s to that roller-coaster ride,

another year with a son

growing, growing

toward his own summer time.

Maybe that’s why we like rhyme,

like rock and roll, that repeat

and repeat; simple

pleasures you can count on:

Wet bathing suits that hang on

a line of laughter,

outboard motors in a chorus

that rides the surf of a backbeat.

Bradley R. Strahan

❦ ❦ ❦

One hundred sixty-one square foot off-grid UK vacation rental: I’m picturing myself there while I wait here in reception for the endodontist to drill my father’s molar. By my eyeball reckoning, this space I occupy is 10 times that cabin, 1601 square feet. Here there’s free wifi to be slurped up from the Eye Center next suite over; here 80’s soft rock continuum; here high pitched whines through poorly muffled walls, your free hearing test while you wait.

There near the cabin birds sing from bushes while the woman wheels her gear and provisions down the trail in a child’s red wagon. Through the door, walls mostly windows, narrow mattress in a loft, ingenious shelving. No electric, no phone. What would I pack? Fresh ground, not instant, and my self-contained backpacking filter? Titanium 1 liter pot and little brass stove with a pint of Everclear 190, wonderful dual use distillation? (Fuel and hand sanitizer, or what else might you be thinking?) Vegetables I’ve dried for rehydration; miso and peanut butter and don’t forget chocolate?

All this I imagine as I scroll through photos and read the article in my Apple News feed. Feed, apt name for the pressurized flow each time I open my phone. Not unlike a late night procedure relegated to us interns on the wards: snort of xylocaine gel in the nostril, slide the large-bore tube up and then waggle down behind the soft palate, on down and down until we hear stomach gurgles from a syringe-full of air; now hang a pre-digested bag of amino acids, simple sugars, fat emulsion & vitamins like turbid gray cyborg milk and watch it drip.

I’m sated. Stop the drip. Take me off the grid. I can do without calls, texts, alarms, and I’ll vow to make do without keyboards and uploads. Books on paper. These poems by Brad Strahan with their muse reaching out. And don’t forget college-ruled and a ballpoint – the ultimate back to nature.

❦

Bradley Strahan has lived and taught and written all over the world and his poems are a world of imagery and metaphor. His collection This Art of Losing is a night train through Germany, a bridge across the Seine, a girl with neon eyes in Amsterdam, rain through an open window in Macedonia. The atmosphere of place is very strong, but even though one of the section titles insists Not Philosophy these poems are all philosophy; place is simply the door through which metaphor enters and sits down across the table.

Losing what, and why dwell on it? Truth washes up on the reefs of the real. These poems often present as a careful observation or description – they are arresting in their rich musical language, internal rhyme, and stark novel imagery – but each conceals a deeper metaphor. The passage of time; what it conceals and what we grasp to reclaim; the time before us drawing short as we face our inevitable mortality – these are the cold nuclei of our reality. If we ignore them we walk through life as through blue mist. Brad is not morbid in his quest to discover reality but he never turns aside. And the realities that may grant our existence deeper pleasure are like these poems: to be held close, turned over and back, to be fully delved and known.

❦ ❦ ❦

In Translation

for Diana Der-Hovanessian

Eyes blink.

No, I don’t understand.

But truth,

truth is a weary traveler

and what we say

flies out the window

to next in her hair.

The muse,

silly girl, runs

through our hands like light

through window panes,

like drops

down the window

when it rains.

Bradley R. Strahan

❦ ❦ ❦

Merlin’s Song

for Jean Clarence Lambert

Among the souvenirs

of a life of art

what part has

the art of life?

Where

in this magic act

does the magician

exist?

on what rope

over the Niagara

of history

do we cross

as we toss

our baggage

piece by piece

into the flood?

The blood alone

remembers

autumn’s flames

in late December.

Bradley R. Strahan

❦ ❦ ❦

In a Dry Land

Water is laughter, children

running through an empty house,

a phantom guitar heard

in cottonwood shade.

A thread of music weaves

green verses on bleached cloth,

a chorus of crows. Willows sigh,

feet resting in bright water.

You can hear frogs. Insects sing

as a thousand songs hover

just out of reach

like an iridescent dragonfly.

We lie on grassy banks

singing the same old words,

a green song in a land

of brass and hard blue silence.

Bradley R. Strahan

❦ ❦ ❦

Keepsake

Struga, Macedonia

Let me wrap this day in cloud,

press it between boards of pewter –

matte pages of lake hammered by rain.

It will be a whole volume of rain.

The pages will open with thunder

and the sound of water beating on metal.

It must show how church bells rang

with such a hollow clang, hardly heard

against the shouting of sky and water.

There will be a line of birds, waterfowl

swimming through a sky of clouds

as if it was just another river.

For a frame there is a wash of mist

and almost hidden there

the darker forms of hulking mountains.

But in one corner, a balcony, an iron rail,

a gray poet hammering away

while one lone birds sings far better.

Bradley R. Strahan

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Expected and Unexpected

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, FATES, imagery, Katherine Soniat, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Starfish Wash-Up on September 8, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with two poems by Katherine Soniat]

The Right Frequency

allows the next stillness to occur. Welcome each space

as it appears but confirm slowly –

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ as if an adage drifting

down through centuries of smoke.

Try a later roll in summer grass with its sundial fingers

holding you on top the seven-veiled mysteries

of green.

Above that, motionless clouds predict it’s never lickety-split

to the apparent state that counts.

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Urn, goat, and crimson altar-cloth

are flighty suggestions, hard to pin down despite humans

and their sharpened articles of faith.

Tie a select few to the calf-bell of dogma, then with due respect

leave the dotted lines.

Maybe even get off your mount (the high one) and walk beside

those roped or chained, and stumbling.

Each time you are kind, feel how your breath changes,

the frequency of birds at dusk settling in.

Be aware. ++++ ++++ ++++ One pivotal moment

++++ does not foreshadow a calmer forever on earth.

Katherine Soniat

from Starfish Wash-Up

❦ ❦ ❦

The fence will squander its energy through juicy longstem grasses, nutsedges, greeny ferns, the unimpeded conduction of their potassium solute intracellular conduit. Grounded, not shocking. And so the cattle farmer may be forgiven for having applied his two-foot swath of herbicide all down the half mile of the fence’s length. Nevertheless, even months later we measure this still brown compacted earth and imagine what’s been lost. We do not expect to find the blossoms of September a year ago.

Nevertheless, here they are. Oh yes, beyond the fence’s reach where moisture seeps down from the upslope we find exactly what we expected: Ironweed, Cardinal Flower, Crownbeard. And within the fence’s boundary, where grazers have not been re-introduced this summer, we are not at all surprised to discover swath upon swath of Meadow Beauties. But here before us we suddenly come upon precisely what we had not expected to discover: two low herbs with blue thumbnail flowers.

The hikers walking up behind me are a little rattled when I shout, “Look at this!” I point out the swoop of curving stamens and the spotted lower petals and they say, “How nice,” then move along down the trail possibly hoping I won’t be following them too closely, but as of this moment I am having a very good day.

❦

Katherine Soniat’s poems do not enter at the front door and take a companionable seat at the kitchen table. They shift, they transform, they bury their meaning then suddenly burst forth. To read Starfish Wash-Up, I find I must lay my expectations aside. If I stare at the lines too hard they elude me, but then pages later the unexpected connection emerges and allows itself to be recognized. Soniat describes this as “a dissolving context in which time and space blur – only to reassemble in as part of the vaguely familiar.” The themes I sense, across time and generations, are father / daughter, separation / blame, searching / belonging. The two poems I’ve chosen here display these in their own right without requiring the context of the entire collection to fully convey meaning. To read most of the poems, though, one must read all the poems.

This is an unusual and unique book, disturbing at times. The entire volume is titled FATES and it actually includes full-length works by three poets: The Medea Notebooks by Ann Pedone, Starfish Wash-Up by Katherine Soniat, and overflow of an unknown self by D. M. Spitzer. The three collections are completely different in style but their themes and tropes intertwine and challenge. I am repeatedly wrenched from my comfortable perch and yanked into these narratives. As Ann Pedone writes in Jason Confronts Medea, We soak our bodies in the oil of words / all our lives and yet now / after the thousands we have / spoken to each other / you are as strange to me / as the dark-eared goats / feeding on the grasses / beneath your feet.

❦ ❦ ❦

Kingdom

There could have been time for another life before the strong March wind

swept us from us from all-fours, and dropped us near water.

Mirrors waiting.

No denying that the Nth degree of the unknown is upon us, and there’s no hint

of direction for our wasted planet. Our run at flamboyantly hot lifestyles shrunk

the ice (and more) to pieces. Huff ant strut, and we’ve about destroyed

the globe.

We mark time, belch, and remain on the lookout for chatter, though truth is

we are most awkward within the family circle where the food tastes good

bu the term lineage shows ugly signs of meltdown.

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Who sits where

at the last family feast (?) when any mention of disagreement is met

with angular glares of Thou shalt not repeat tales of personal or climate crisis.

And thou shalt instead sip all thy wine then nod at the endlessly grinning?

My determined place at that annual folly? I doze with my clutch of poems

in the family broom-closet – me, yet another calculated risk to the authenticity

of family history.

++++ ++++ ++++ Cursing in couplets, tweeting of human drift measured in masses:

poor continental wanderers – lost infants, men and women. The elders choking on

water, while in my pine-oiled burrow I grow heavy and sniff broom straw – one

way back to the lost animal kingdom.

Katherine Soniat

from Starfish Wash-Up

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Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.

Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”

Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here in my weekly posts and of the literary arts!

You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:

++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.

++++++ Elkin, NC 28621

Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.

If you would prefer to pay via PayPal or Zelle, please contact me for transaction details at:

++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com

[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]

❦ ❦ ❦

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Water Dreams

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Jack Coulehan, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, The Talking Cure on September 1, 2023| 10 Comments »

[ with 3 poems by Jack Coulehan]

Darwin’s Prayer

++++ He saw Darwin on his knees, and there

++++ was no difference between prayer and

++++ pulling a worm from the grass.

++++++++ Roger McDonald, Mr. Darwin’s Shooter

Bright bunches

of gardenias

bloom in November,

the loam at their feet

moistened by dew

and spongy with debris.

As I fill my container

with handfuls of earth

alive with these

marvelous worms,

perfected in being

by the wisdom

of randomness,

I’m astonished

by gratitude.

Jack Coulehan

❦ ❦ ❦

Last night the storm whispered its secrets into my dreams. A long dryness, a vain hoping. This morning the drought has ended and flood warnings will as well in an hour or so. Linda and I head to the E&A rail trail beside Elkin Creek to laugh and point at the heights reached by frothy current. To breathe in the hot seethe and funk of saturated forest. To celebrate.

The sadness of the creek slams us, stops us, stills us. Its churning water is the color of pumpkin soup; Spike the Heron does not stalk here; the rattle of Kingfisher is silent, fled. Oh yes, we generally get muddy after a downpour, but never this bad. Miles from here, north of Carter Falls, the dry weeks have parched and cracked 500 acres of tobacco field. No riparian buffer, no catchment pond, not one single fuck does the tobacco farmer give for all of us downstream: when rain eventually returns it can’t slow itself, can’t soak the earth. It has no choice but to sluice foaming into the creek carrying inch-acres of red clay with it.

❦

The poems in Jack Coulehan’s The Talking Cure are expansive; they span the human experience and human influence. Many of his poems have arisen from his decades as teacher, physician, healer; the lines are populated by his patients and their struggles. So often these lines also reflect his own struggle, both to heal and be healed. Other poems explore his family through the generations. Others reflect his deep relationship with literary figures that formed him and with teachers who informed him.

In all of these poems I sense a web of connection. As humans we must all struggle to discover our purpose in being. In this struggle each of us is touched by the people we allow to approach us, to close in, to climb over the wall. And each of us touches others and touches the earth: the human experience and the human influence.

I selected these three poems in particular for their focused peering into that influence, and also for their universality. Jack Coulehan is a humanist, a person who believes that human beings have it within their power to improve the lives of other people whom they are willing to touch. So often, so easily and thoughtlessly, so many of us focus only on our power to dominate, to harm. We easily destroy the earth itself without even noticing. Let us stop and think. Let us feel. Let us touch and allow ourselves to be touched. Perhaps each of our individual lives can enlarge its span. The power of many begins with the power of one.

We are all downstream from someone, and all upstream.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Cherry Orchard

++++ If a great many remedies

++++ are suggested for some disease,

++++ it means the disease is incurable.

++++++++ Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

The end of the century

has come upon us

without a sign of release

or the beginning of justice.

We’re selling the orchard

to pay our debts

and reminiscing about

love’s excitements,

life’s mistakes. I suspect

a century ago the hearts

of the people sitting here

were just as generous,

intense, and cruel as ours.

A miniature flower

thrives in the moisture

and dust of a broken

pavement – this is the gist

of the matter. We want

so strongly to believe

the flower will spread

everywhere. How quickly

it dies! If the disease

had a cure, we would not need

so many remedies.

Jack Coulehan

❦ ❦ ❦
.

Garden of Endurance

++++ Cassia grandis, Costa Rica

Cassia fruit covers the forest floor,

a blanket of black sausage stinking

in the heat as it decomposes,

a mote in the eye of permanence.

Built for grinding by gigantic teeth,

Cassia’s fibrous case condemns its seeds

to suffering, with neither mastodon

nor megatherium alive to free them

and distribute their undigested life

in mounds of shit. Its glory left behind

by climate, tooth, and claw, Cassia

endures by the grace of rodents

that gnaw its weakest fibers

and let a few fertile seeds escape

before they rot. Anachronistic

fruit, your survival – sweet tickle

of a breeze, illusion of peace,

diminishment that overcomes

extinction – is an inheritance

for my kind, too. A hopeful omen.

Jack Coulehan

For additional poems by Jack Coulehan, see last week’s post, Plow Straight, from August 25, 2023.

❦ ❦ ❦

Join me in celebrating the release of my newest poetry collection, How We All Fly, from The Orchard Street Press.

Poet Patricia Hooper comments: “Through close observations of the physical world, these clear, direct poems yield insights into the corresponding life of the spirit.” And Rebecca Baggett says this: “Throughout these poems, but particularly toward the collection’s end, How We All Fly leads the reader up and onward, infusing even inevitable losses with tenderness, trust, and hope.”

You may sample the opening poem from the collection here:

Thank you for your support, both of the writing you discover here and of the literary arts!

You may purchase a copy of How We All Fly directly from me by mailing a check for $15 (postage included) to this address:

++++++ 131 Bon Aire Rd.

++++++ Elkin, NC 28621

Please make your check payable to Bill Griffin.

If you would prefer to pay via PayPal, please contact me for transaction details at:

++++++ comments@griffinpoetry.com

[Patricia Hooper is author of Wild Persistence, University of Tampa Press. Rebecca Baggett’s most recent book is The Woman Who Lives Without Money, Regal House Publishing.]

❦ ❦ ❦