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Cusp

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2023| 13 Comments »

 . 
[with 5 poems from Kakalak 2023]
 . 
Autumnal Asymptote
 . 
The sun’s last red is seeping through the maple now,
and umber too, like the webbing of a frog, like the shadow of winter.
How tenderly the ground holds each leaf. How lightly they rest
before they snuggle down under the rain.
Such a wealth of dying. The coin of the land is on its edge,
a membrane, the balance of water, seeping –
even the roots break light together.
Even the fungus breathes its gifts
to the soil.
 . 
Even the breath of me shatters this silent grace.
My steps churn leaves, worm-cast, root, stone.
The arc of reaching out is endless, airless –
I cannot kiss the earth’s brow so lightly.
She cannot sigh and settle beneath my hand.
 . 
Hannah Ringler
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am about to read an online poem titled Bicuspid and I immediately tell myself it will be about that congenital heart syndrome in which the aortic valve has only two leaflets instead of the normal three (“tricuspid”). The man in the poem won’t even know he harbors the cardiac defect. His life will be flowing along its secure expected trajectory until suddenly in his 30’s he won’t be able to walk up a flight of steps or have sex without gasping for breath. Everything crashes – painful tests & procedures, dangerous surgery, bankrupting bills, a foot-long scar down his sternum. The life he was a moment before so confidently devouring has abruptly turned to eat him up and spit him out. Will he discover a new center?
 . 
The title also launches me into another favorite pastime – etymology. Just what is a cusp, anyway? Whenever you open yourself to a new field of exploration, your first big hurdle is its vocabulary. In scientific parlance, its nomenclature, but, hey, still just words. Don’t your non-poet friends’ eyes glaze over when you wax rhapsodic about enjambment? I know when my grandfather G. C. Cooke attended medical school in the nineteen-teens his required courses included Greek and Latin. Maybe he couldn’t do anything about Bicuspid Aortic Valve Syndrome, or even diagnose it pre-mortem, but he definitely was armed with all the nomenclature he needed to know cusp derives from Latin cuspis, a spear or a point, and the first recorded use of tricuspidem for “three-pointed” is from the 1660’s.
 . 
Dig deep beneath the words growing in these lines, whether cultivated garden or rank unruly weeds, and you discover that all is metaphor. The cusp of the moment is a fulcrum impossible to balance upon; leap left or leap right? The spear prods your back; it will not permit you to remain standing on this spot of ground you imagined so stable. The motion of your very heart is arrested, worn out of synch, its fluttering leaflets no longer able to manage the flow of your minutes.
 . 
Wow. I read the poem. Turns out it’s describing teeth. Bicuspid, duh. But it is still all about getting chewed up by life. And it’s awesome.
 . 
❦
 . 
[ read Bicuspid by Clemonce Heard on poets.org HERE ]
[ and HERE is my favorite online Etymology Dictionary (or download the app Etymology Explorer) ]
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Under
++ from the early Chinese philosopher Mencius:
++“The ten thousand things are part of me.
++ Treat those things as you would treat yourself.”
 . 
Under the cloud, a man in the airplane
looks down from the window and yawns
at the mountain’s green canopy,
the towering tree where, under
a branch, the owl sleeps.
Under the owl, a young mother
leans against the rugged trunk;
under her eyes, a small screen,
her frog thumbs hopping;
under the screen, her hands.
Under her darting glances,
her child squats. Under the child
the tumbling river dances;
under the river, the rock.
 . 
The child lifts the rock and squeals
as, under the rock, the crayfish wakes.
Between two fingers, under her gaze,
its curious feelers, its wiggling tail,
its many legs running midair,
its hooked fingers; its eyes
examine her. It whispers in her hear.
The water stirs. She lifts the rock again
and tenderly tucks the crayfish
under, for now she knows
the ten thousand things are part of her.
 . 
Martha O. Adams
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Fox Moves in Nearby
 . 
As incense from a censer,
+++ wildness wafts about him –
he saunters
+++ outside our sliding door.
 . 
Red as cinnamon,
+++ gray-flecked belly,
he swings his head side to side,
takes everything in
+++ his black pearl eyes.
Squirrels scatter,
+++ grackles fly.
 . 
He lifts his leg and marks
+++ the stoop
and, with deliberation,
+++ three stones by the fountain.
 . 
He hesitates, concludes,
+++ and prances
through the hostas,
+++ slows beneath the forsythia,
squeezes through the fence.
 . 
We spend sever quiet breaths,
+++ fingertips on glass,
before we step out to sense
+++ his leaving.
The birds flit back
+++ to feed and chatter
Shadows underlying trees
+++ are darker,
redbirds, redder.
 . 
Preston Martin
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A few weeks back a friend in my writer’s group (holy poesy, Bill is in a writer’s group now!) mentioned that she has edited an anthology by poets near her home in northwest Ohio. Imagine opening a collection and recognizing the writers by name! See their faces as you read their lines, hear their inflections and cadence. You might realize immediately that the poem is about teeth and not heart valves. Such a concept!
 . 
Welcome to Kakalak 2023. Although the editors no longer require a North or South Carolina connection in order to submit, I still discover many friends and acquaintances in the pages of this annual anthology. This year’s book very much retains the flavor of the South – has there ever been an issue without at least one mention of red clay or grits? But these almost 200 pages span most everything that could be said to make us human, whether grief or exaltation, recollection or discovery, love or despair, current events or origin stories, even a raised middle finger to the Home Owner’s Association.
 . 
I’ve read the book through from page one to the end. I intentionally avoided skipping straight to the names I know in order to discover names I want to get to know. I used my standard criteria to select three poems to feature here, which is no criteria at all except what grabs me in the moment of reading (and the three quickly becam five, eleven, fifty). Do you need some new friends? As Robert Frost invites when he heads down to clear the pasture spring – You come too!
 . 
❦
 . 
[ Kakalak 2023 is edited by Angelo Geter, David E. Poston, and Kimberlyn Blum-Hyclack; learn more about Kakalak, and purchase  HERE ]
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Moon-Child
 . 
+++ +++ +++ Sophie has pummeled the beach all day
+++ with the unbridled vigor of a one-year-old
dog, her tail held aloft like a kite gaining the wind
 . 
She is tired and wonders why we’ve come back at this hour,
+++ though sand feels coos as the night sky peels off
+++ +++ the top layers of heat. She pants and leans into me.
 . 
+++ +++ That’s enough, isn’t it?
+++ To feel day draining into atmosphere?
+++ +++ To hear the surf recite the history of a planet –
 . 
+++ +++ +++ extinction events,
+++ +++ +++ +++ rise and fall of Rome,
+++ +++ +++ discovery, war, conquest,
+++ +++ pandemics, and underneath it all,
+++ echoes of lost Atlantis rumbling in the waves?
 . 
Sophie’s nose twitches.
+++ Something in the dark has put her on alert.
The cone of my flashlight reveals where a ghost crab
 . 
+++ +++ has been sidling. A moon-child
+++ +++ +++ gleaning alms offered by the tide
+++ +++ has scribed in the sand abstract patterns,
 . 
ragged as the Milky Way,
+++ like a record of all the small events
that drive the Earth, too delicate to see.
 . 
Gregory Lobas
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Hive in the Wall
 . 
Sometimes, when a soul has more to say,
it holds on to some place, some person,
or just moves in between joists and frames,
 . 
taking the shapes of bees, even their names,
their endless buzz near the too-warm kitchen.
Unlike other ghosts, they work by day.
 . 
They still need light and the scent of wet grass,
flowers that love summer and last until fall.
They, I say they, but I mean they act as one.
 . 
Many creatures made of one spirit, a mass
that’s a fused, united, yet scattered, all.
That’s what it takes to get the job done.
 . 
This may not be true, but here’s what I believe:
that one day, all bees, in one swarm, will leave.
 . 
Paul Jones
from Kalalak 2023, Harrisburg, NC. © Moonshine Review Press 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hannah Ringler (Durham, NC) is a poet, gardener, and educator.
 . 
Martha O. Adams (Hendersonville, NC) includes drawings for coloring with her recent meditative poem In Your Meadow.
 . 
Preston Martin (Chapel Hill, NC) facilitates classes in poetry and literature at Duke Continuing Education.
 . 
Gregory Lobas (Columbus, NC) won the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in 2022 for Left of Center.
 . 
Paul Jones (Chapel Hill, NC) is a member of the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame and some of his poems crashed on the moon.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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2020-03-07 Doughton Park Tree
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Off Balance

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on November 17, 2023| 16 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Jane Shlensky]
 . 
Balance
 . 
Each morning Granny hobbles to the spring
uphill two miles with buckets in her hands
through woods now thick with frost, limbs cleared of leaves.
And over rocks almost atop a hill
behind her house, she sees the water gush,
and, slow with age, she stoops to clear away
the leaves and sticks that clot the pulses’ rush,
and, cracked cup in her hand, she dips into
“sweet water” as she calls it, gathered wild
as honey in abandoned rees, and pours
the nectar into metal milking pails
to carry down the mountain, arms held far
from hips and sides, all tense – as pugilists
might hold their arms, quite low with hands in fists.
But her fists grip the metal handle’s cut
into her palms, as water weighs her down
and down the well-worn path toward her house.
I offer her a new artesian well,
but she just laughs at me and shakes her head.
I ask if I may carry home the spring
for her, but she denies she wants the help
and says it gives her reason for a walk
among the trees on any given day
and carrying two buckets makes her sure
of foot and balanced in a world that’s not.
 . 
Jane Shlensky
from Barefoot on Gravel, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY; © 2016
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I hate my anger more than I hate vomiting. The dead sick inevitability as it rises, how it makes my hands go cold and clenches my jaw. Disorienting, paralyzing rational thought. I am not going to let that anger out.
 . 
People tell you it’s best if you do. You have to let go of your anger. Maybe they’re right, because while it’s rising I don’t even see it coming, I don’t know to call it anger, I have no warning or defense that might prevent the stupid things I will do or the hurtful things I will say. I am afraid of the anger so I run from it before it can get me. Running, stumbling, I usually fall. Anger blasts me off balance.
 . 
Linda and I are sitting in the car. We had thought to take a walk in the gardens but now I’ve picked a fight with her, I can’t even recall about what. Linda has never let me get away with anything – I say this with honest, grudging admiration – and she says something now that jars me: “So is this what it’s going to be, then?” She is seeing something I can’t see. I admit it. I’m so confused, I tell her. And so she pushes me to relive the last couple of hours, ticking over the balance sheet – frustration at last night’s botched meeting, undercurrent of worried anticipation for tomorrow, niggling mis-steps and course changes this morning that had me snapping at a friend, patience evaporating to hot steam. Little angers mounting, not let out.
 . 
At last she wants to give me some justification. “Anyone would feel that way.” Not this time. True or not, I’m not buying that line. I’ve used it a hundred times to tamp down the anger, cover it and hide it. I don’t actually gain much insight into all this until much later, but there is one best way to regain some balance. To let anger’s own entropy cool it down to nothing. Sitting in the car next to Linda, I open up and own it. I said and did things that hurt people; I am responsible. I am sorry. I’m not happy with myself or the situation, but at least the two of us are finding enough balance to begin our walk after all.
 . 
❦
 . 
It hurts to walk barefoot on gravel. When I first met Linda, she and her sisters went barefoot all summer long. It was nothing for them to walk a mile or two on those tar-and-gravel Ohio roads or through the woods over dry twigs and sweetgum balls. I tried to keep up, limping like an old codger and next day lame. But I kept walking on sore feet because I wanted to keep up. I wanted to be near them.
 . 
Jane Shlensky’s poems will not make you limp although they can be sharp and pointed. They will make you want to come along and keep up. Jane loves her characters, which she has drawn from generations of rural memories and red clay. She grew up in Yadkin County, NC, just across the muddy river from me, and she sees those farmers and grandmothers and wives more clearly than they ever saw themselves, perhaps. I don’t sense Jane imploring us to return to those old times and old ways. Instead, she shines her light on the truth of what brought her up and made her. What we carry in our pockets may change, but what we carry in our hearts does not. Read Barefoot on Gravel and find a moment of balance in a world that is so often not.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Ain’t No Sunshine
 . 
“Oh, Lord,” she says, mixing the batter
for pancakes, the sausages sizzling,
the coffee perking in her mama’s pot
that’s so worn it’s barely metal.
She keeps it for the comforting perk,
fragrant life bubbling up, making promises.
 . 
But he’s in his wing chair, hunkered
over his guitar, his face blank as rain,
his strum, hum, strum him,
accompanying his slow moan.
His voice is like buttered rum, oiled
and warm as fever, just enough gravel
in his bass notes to scratch at her heart.
 . 
“Oh, Lord, that man,” she says to no one,
but her Lord hears everything in her heart.
She knows this as sure as she knows
the spit of oil before she tips the batter in,
as sure as she knows the hiss and blister,
bubble browning in the cakes.
 . 
He is having one of his blue days –
won’t fight the sadness, just leans on
that old guitar, curls in on himself
like a dog that hopes to lick the pain away.
He’s finding a sound to help him stand,
a trembling chord to lift a mighty weight.
 . 
He’s singing his own song and she knows it,
her heart clutching at his words, wishing
she could mother is sorrow away, feed
his hopes. She needs him, even if
they struggle every day. She turns to Jesus
kneeling on the wall and whispers,
“Dear Lord, that man there . . . we best
but some blueberries in these cakes.”
 . 
Jane Shlensky
from Barefoot on Gravel, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY; © 2016
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
One Better
 . 
While we puzzled over the perfect
birthday gift for our father,
he packed up his fishing gear and
a few clothes and bid us farewell.
 . 
Jane Shlensky
from Barefoot on Gravel, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY; © 2016
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22

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Small Voices

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2023| 9 Comments »

 . 
[With poetry by Joy Harjo and Wendell Berry]
 . 
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
 . 
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
 . 
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
 . 
Open the door, then close it behind you.
 . 
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
 . 
Give it back with gratitude.
 . 
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
 . 
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
 . 
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
 . 
Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
 . 
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
 . 
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
 . 
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
 . 
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
 . 
Do not hold regrets.
 . 
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
 . 
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
 . 
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
 . 
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
 . 
Ask for forgiveness.
 . 
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
 . 
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
 . 
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
 . 
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
 . 
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
 . 
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
 . 
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
 . 
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
 . 
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
 . 
Joy Harjo
from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
[Great Smoky Mountains National Park bids Bill farewell during the last moments of the Tremont Writers’ Conference:]
 . 
Goodbye, Love. Thanks for dropping by. This is your last chance to slurp up the prompts you were thinking you might be handed while you’re here. Your last opportunity to be inspired. Which means what, exactly? Inspire, breathe in, be filled with spirit. But did you think I’d tip you up like a funnel and just pour right down? Think back to that little exercise in your application and cull one word – community. This is something I know all about, I the Queen of Connections, I the web of interactions, whether in a gram of soil beneath your feet or spanning the entire watershed of this Middle Prong that flows past you right now – community.
 . 
I’m more than willing to speak. I live to show myself to you. Take a closer look at my image in that postcard and read the fine print: International Biosphere Reserve. But did you notice how small those letters are compared to the beech and oak overtowering? The subtext is, you don’t have to be such a geek about it. Oh sure, learn my names, my histories, my ecologies, but please, for at least one moment, forget about words on paper, Human Person, and just look around you.
 . 
Right around you – seven faces peering back (eight, if you count Jeremy arriving with the coffee delivery). What have you found here, and what will you keep? It’s more than friendship, it’s more than a shared task and a common goal. It’s connection. Don’t drop it. Don’t lose it. And what I’m really saying is . . . See you later!
 . 
 . 
❦
 . 
More than a week has passed and I’m straining hard to hear the Middle Prong. Where has that connection flown? What was the sound of that beckoning? Have I traveled too far beyond its reach, too many highway miles, too many turnings within?
 . 
Here I am surrounded by books and papers, electronics and plastics, literally surrounded: Amelia says, “Your office is a big mess, Pappy.” Surrounded and cumbered by the “should’s” and “got to’s” that no doubt fill your world as well. First phone calls of the day: a change in tomorrow’s doctor appointments for Mom and Dad; on hold and digital assistant waiting for their financial manager; negotiating the week’s schedule. If only the tinnitus I constantly live with sounded more like wind in the pines and rushing water.
 . 
But right now a female cardinal is craning to reach the suet feeder I’ve hidden in the center of the holly outside my window. In an hour, Linda and I will take our first walk together on a new little sprig of MST I helped work on this month. I am rich in these connections and many more. I grieve for those who don’t experience community. Who walk past the little purple flower sprouted through the concrete and never see it. Who feel mostly alienation and suspicion for the human beings around them, much less the non-bipedal creatures. Who cut themselves off from the voice of wind that wants to fill them and let them breathe deep. Philosophers and poets write heavy volumes about the sickness in our human spirits when we separate ourselves from the earth. What is our reply?
 . 
Perhaps this Voice is saying, “C’mon, little Man. You know some folks who need to hear me. Spin a few connections!” See you later. See you now!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
 . 
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
anymore. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
 . 
Wendell Berry
Copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973 by Wendell Berry. Excerpted from The Country of Marriage. Reprinted in THE SUN June, 2014
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Today’s poems were offered as direction for meditation while visiting our “secret spots” during several days at Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. Any program at Tremont always includes space for quiet reflection while outdoors in nature, whether your secret spot is halfway up the Lumber Ridge Trail or a big smooth rock beside the Little River.
 . 
Joy Harjo (born 1951) was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, (W. W. Norton, 2019), and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
 . 
Wendell Berry (born 1934) is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, along with many other awards and honors. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree -- 5/1/2021

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