Imagery | V E R S E and I M A G E

Archive for the ‘Imagery’ Category

Bridge

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bridge, family, imagery, J. S. Absher, MST, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Stan Absher on September 2, 2022| 14 Comments »

[with 3 poems by J. S. Absher]

Building bridges. Maybe as a metaphor the phrase is not quite as worn down, rusty, and liable to drop chunks of concrete as the old Elkin bridge that carried US 21 high above the Yadkin River and railroad tracks. Built in 1931, stretching 1509 feet, named for Hugh G. Chatham, even after it was condemned by DOT in 2008 we still couldn’t bring ourselves to call in the demolition crews for that old bridge until 2010. Spanning a treacherous gulf. Lowering barriers between two rival communities. Safe passage, a more elevated view of life, making connections. Grand old metaphor.

The bridge we built today, though, is not a metaphor. It’s a 50-foot aluminum frame that will span a creek near the Mitchell River to extend the Mountains-to-Sea trail a few more miles. Mike, the engineer, showed us how to lay out the dozens of struts and braces and then we were on them like chicks on a Junebug. We put it together in three sections inside the big Surry County maintenance building at Fisher River Park; later we’ll move it into place, bolt the last connectors, and add planking. Amazing to see pallets of unrecognizable metal pieces becoming a structure.

Some of these volunteers today were born with a torque wrench in their fist but some are like me, tinkering all day with my Erector Set when I was 10. Sweating even with the giant fan blowing, pinching our fingers, joking. I still can’t get the smell of Anti-Seize out from under my fingernails. Someday soon will I hike across that bridge with my grandkids and say, “Hey, that’s one of my bolts!?” Moving out into a new world. Grand old metaphor.

❦

September, 2022, all that’s left of the old Chatham Bridge on the Surry County side is a pleasant pedestrian garden with a long stairway from Gwyn Avenue down to Main Street. And, near the former base of one of those mighty pylons, the Angry Troll Brewery.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Day

The little room’s only window looked out
towards the ridgetop, the Dunkard church in the curve
of the two-lane, and, just beyond, the graveyard.

The morning sun sidled in past the partly
closed slats and resolved into rays and flecks
burning in the light – dust motes, I know,

and likely knew then, too, but still I watched
entranced one morning after our breakfast.
On this day I’d have otherwise forgotten,

probably my grannies were in the kitchen –
Emma with arms stretched out to read who’d died
(she’d be in the Dunkard cemetery soon),

half-crippled Sallie stringing the green beans
(years of suffering and strokes lay just ahead) —
while I stood quietly in the little room

watching the random sparkles in the sunbeam,
worlds I could move with a single breath
of poem or prayer, but could not control.

J. S. Absher
from Skating Rough Ground, © 2022 J. S. Absher, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT

❦ ❦ ❦

worlds I could move with a single breath / of poem or prayer, but could not control

I have often been moved by Stan Absher’s poetry. Not moved as by a shiver of emotion or a momentary ah ha at his thesis or his craft. Rather I’ve felt myeself shifted into a different awareness, a new plane of being. Translocated. Enlightened. Despite the deep bedrock of conviction in all his work, despite the scholarship and the epiphany, he writes as if he is still searching, searching for truth. A spiritual seeker. So he may claim, but I consider Stan Absher a spiritual finder. I can’t help believing as I read these poems that he has encountered and grasped the numinous, wrestled with God as did Jacob.

Worlds he can move but not control? Perhaps that is the secret Stan conveys and which I would do well to take into my own heart. The seeking itself is intrinsic to the desideratum. The bridge. The poems in Skating Rough Ground cover such a lot of ground. Family history, Christian history, art history, and every topic and observation is put to diligent good work unfolding the petals of the human flower. Stan is in perfect control of his art, which makes even more believable his message that our condition enfolds a great mystery.

One other remark: even though Stan mentions Wittgenstein and his book includes sixteen erudite endnotes, his poems are never high-flown or inaccessible. He is not looking down on us mortals from the heights; he is right here among us. And he is not above a little poke in the ribs or the murmur of a wry joke. These poems are companionable companions – pick up the book and come along on the journey.

[additional information on works by J. S. Absher . . . ]

❦ ❦ ❦

The Conversation of Matter

I could hear things talk. When something was lost,
I stood in the room, asked it to show itself.
Sometimes it spoke an image in the mind – a drawer
++++ to search, a cherry
++++ bureau to look under.

Those who have spent their lives mastering tools
and techniques can hear their material speak,
David crying naked out of Carrara marble
++++ to be rescued from
++++ Agostino’s botched start.

But things usually speak by resisting –
weight too heavy to lift, edge too sharp to hold,
a moving part that grinds and heats and breaks, a poem’s
++++ application of
++++ friction to language –

slow it! stoke it hotter than Gehenna!
salt its path with grit!
keep it from slip-sliding
away on its own melt! flick sawdust into the eye
++++ to make it dilate!
++++ Without friction – so said

Wittgenstein, older and word-worn – language
does not work. If it wears skates on rough ground, it
takes a tumble. Even prayer needs resistance – a stick
++++ crosswise in the throat
++++ garbling words like a sob.

How hard to admit we love the world – how
hard it ought to be – yet its unrequiting
beauty resists abandonment: Show yourself, come out
++++ of hiding, come out
++++ of quarantine, and live.

J. S. Absher
from Skating Rough Ground, © 2022 J. S. Absher, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT

❦ ❦ ❦

The Creator Praises Birds

Vent and crissum,
lores and crest and comb: I
made them all – the

nares, nape, those
horny bill plates – I in
feathered trochees

made them: peacock,
sparrow, tufted titmouse,
flitting jenny

filled with joy of
beaking worm, of strut and
glide, of piping

double on their
syrinx. Praise how flock and
murmuration

call out warning,
call to fly or roost or
call for pleasure:

See me! Hear me!
Pur-ty! Pur-ty! Pur-ty!
Cheer up! Pibbity!

Praise the brave-heart
tender fledgling, wobbly
winging over

houses, over
pavement, risking all to
climb the air by

beating wind I
too created, rising
heavenward in joy.

J. S. Absher
from Skating Rough Ground, © 2022 J. S. Absher, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT

❦ ❦ ❦

Read Full Post »

Life Alert

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, Miles A. Coon, nature photography, poetry, Press 53 on August 26, 2022| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Miles A. Coon]

to become the very brink you live on . . . Miles Coon

The other day I was trying to fix my Dad’s Life Alert system while the rest of the family ate lunch fifteen feet away. I couldn’t figure out why the damn lights kept flashing. While I was cussing the instruction booklet – there’s such a thing as being written too simply – I overheard Dad tell my daughter, “Bill sure does a lot for us.”

Haven’t I always been the good boy? May I confess that all my life I’ve chosen to do things that would confirm my good boy status? Around 20 years ago I wrote a sonnet titled, Good Boy Turns 50; the closing couplet reads, So let’s give him what he needs in the next fifty / if he ever discovers what that might be. Was I trying to slip in a bit of tension there, as if maybe I don’t always like myself for striving always to be the person everyone likes?

Someday I’ll write a poem about being twenty and driving the interstate back to college from Pittsburgh with my friend John in the big bashed up Mercury I’d inherited from Granddaddy. One of the near-bald tires blew, and as we rolled to a stop on the shoulder we looked at each other and started to sweat. In the trunk, on top of the spare, was a big trash bag of illegal vegetation John had plucked up, roots and all, from where he’d been growing it out back of his parents’ estate while they were in Paris or Tokyo or some such. We tried to look purposeful, puttering around the trunk until the traffic thinned, then threw the bag up into the weeds (no pun, please), jacked up the car, wrenched on the spare, and retrieved John’s harvest. No lights & sirens. Back at school in central Ohio after dark, I unloaded John behind his dorm. End of story. Good boy escapes to be good another day.

Someday I’ll write a poem about that.

Not today.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Beginning

Before I had a self, I grew
in the half-dark, half-light world
I knew belonged to me.

Two disappointing gods
shaped me. Before I had
a self, I was a topiary.

Birds were everywhere
in me, singing, while I
stood mute.

One day, the gods split
this world in two.
Before I had a self,

I was taken by each of them
to the great sea of disillusionment,
thrown in from separate shores.

My first-self emerged from the sea,
my body soaked in brine.
I could taste my own salts.

To be washed clean,
to be naked and alone,
to become the very brink you live on

is to bury your gods,
as your heirs will bury you.
This is genesis, where we begin.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

As I reached the close of each poem in The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, I paused, loosed held breath, then returned to the beginning to read it again. Not because the poems are difficult to understand. The poems are so full of understanding I couldn’t hold it all in a single reading. The language is as beautiful and fresh as the stories are piercing and full of hurt, yet the speaker heals in the telling and heals us. Observer, actor, perpetrator – innocent, confused, divine – Miles Coon enters himself through doors he opens as if for the first time and enters us as if we are knowing another person for the first time.

I am still learning about myself from this book. Perhaps that is its theme, that we may explore our selves all our lives and never reach the end of our journey. How heartbreaking and how full of joy the final line of the final poem: How little of this world I know.

[Note: Miles died on May 21, 2022, just days before the publication by Press 53 of his first book-length collection of poems.]

❦ ❦ ❦

Where I Was Going

I.
Where was I going under the weight
of my bookbag, case law, and statutes? Not to the
Harvard Café for Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes.
Not to the cinderblock dorms, their dimly lit corridors
of thought. Not home. Where was I going so full of
argument and words?

II.
I joined the cynical and jaded. My father hired me.

Not to work next to illegal aliens in the plastics factory.
Not to load forty-two-foot trailer trucks with
one hundred forty thousand garment hangers, stacked
in cases, side-by-side, front-to-back, floor-to-
ceiling, every cubic inch packed tight.

Not to the boss’s office where the Harvard Law degree
vanished into uh-oh, here comes the boss’s son.
Not to the trade shows at the Hotel New Yorker
where I licked the soles of jobbers, plied them
with booze.

III.
Where was I going? To the fertility expert with my semen
in a jar? Never to Little League with my son. Never
to go ice-skating with my daughter. Where was I going?

Not three times a week to Dr. Bernie, self-indulgent,
taking a magnifying glass to my problems. He said
I had it wrong. We were removing the magnifying glass.

IV.
Where was I going, going to
my father’s funeral, my mother’s grave. I was going
to the closing when I sold the business. I was going
to my daughter’s wedding, to the firehouse where my son
showed me his gear and the enormous truck
he drove to Ground Zero.

Where was I going? Not to grow fables of my own
making: I was just going to my wife’s studio
to help support her art, I was going to write a poem for her,
always my best reader.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

Against a Wall

Sometimes, when the moon
is courted by wolves,
and the bats shake themselves out,

I’ll move through the mouth
of the cave like a breath,
press against the windowpane,

and there inside the house
a frail young boy stands stiff
against a wall. His father measures him.

His mother, tanned, hair bleach-blonde,
shines the sterling silver tray,
then serves a fifth of Haig & Haig

in the cut crystal drinking glass.
The boy’s dismissed
the minute his father takes a sip.

I’ve pressed my ear
to the landscaped ground
and heard the panic in his retreat

on tiptoe, in stocking feet.
His only trace, his father’s mark,
indelible on the measuring wall.

Though I cannot leave
the dark until it’s dark,
I do survive.

Here, inside the cave,
bats hang
harmless as handkerchiefs.

I can hear my tardy rebel stir
from years of sleep,
rising up, stretching his limbs,

hungering for light.
Soon, I will follow him out,
marking the walls as I go.

Miles A. Coon
from The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, © 2022, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

It takes the lake to make a line of moonlight . . . Miles A. Coon, from Shadow Life

Read Full Post »

Tearing Them Up

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Brockman Campbell Award, imagery, John Hoppenthaler, nature photography, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on August 19, 2022| 8 Comments »

[with 4 poems by John Hoppenthaler]

When Saul turned 9, his Mom passed down her old tablet to him. No phone, internet disabled; he didn’t use it to learn higher math or play games. What Saul did with that cracked and creaky tablet was create videos. He wrote, produced, and narrated a whole series titled, “Animal Habitat.” First were the off-center and slightly zany documentaries of the daily lives of the family pets. Then he moved on to both parents, then toddler sister (not an entirely complimentary biopic of the latter). The search for ever more subjects led him to, uh oh, grandparents.

“Welcome to Animal Habitat. Today we explore a very strange creature, The Granny. Here she is in her native surroundings doing what she loves to do most – tear up old National Geographics. Why does she do this every afternoon? That is just one of the mysteries of Animal Habitat.”

Yes, Linda does tear up old National Geographic magazines. We had close to fifty years of accumulated piles – beginning with the oldest, she’s been ripping out articles she wants to keep, reread, and refer to before recycling the discards. She sorts the articles by topic and stores them in clear plastic sheaths (leftovers from my comic book collection). We’ve been learning a lot. I believe she’s made it to August, 2010.

Tearing up National Geographics – the perfect metaphor for our long marriage. You can’t hang on to all your old garbage; sometimes the big heave ho is mandatory. Some of that stuff is mildewed, nasty, blacks your fingers. Nevertheless, there are definitely some pearls in there worth recovering and holding up to the light. Better yet, you might learn something new. In fact, there’s a new issue every month – you’d better always be open to learning something new.

One more thing – when Linda does discover anything cool, she shares it with me.

❦

John Hoppenthaler discovers metaphors in the garden: metaphors for the prickly beauty of love, for weeds of rejection and disappointment, for childhood and parenthood, for loss and luminous joy. John’s 2015 collection, domestic garden (Carnegie Mellon University Press), is one I won’t be tearing up or consigning to a plastic envelope. I’ll keep it on a shelf nearby, ready for when I need to learn something new.

❦ ❦ ❦

domestic garden

A ghost has disarranged these roses
+++ lining the walkway. Some greenhouse
++++++ jokester must have switched

Jackson & Perkins packaging – Heaven
+++ on Earth for Change of Heart, Black

Magic with Beloved. I’ll name them
+++ rancor lilies in your absence, though
++++++ I don’t hate you, & they’re not lilies,

& you aren’t really gone, except in the way
+++ presence sometimes contradicts itself.

Should they grow on me – fugitive varietals
+++ I never thought to plant – will they lure
++++++ your bouquet any closer, spirit

away weeks I’ll name neglect, aphids
+++ who’ll stay aphids, sucking at the stalk?

John Hoppenthaler
from domestic garden, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

passing

I’ve just received a text that says a buddy
died last night but that doctors brought him back
to us with a shot, and so my friend is a Lazarus.

I’m in a boathouse owned by another old pal;
he is traveling for work somewhere abroad.

Mallards have lifted from the vernal pond,
and thousands of frogs are singing
because it’s raining. I wish Bill ws here so we could

talk about our friend who has gone and returned.
Crows call to each other across the lake. Same old

story: there’s danger and it surrounds us. And now
the blue heron I’d failed to notice pulls his legs
free of mud and flies away. A small falcon skims

the shoreline. When he was raised, was Lazarus pleased?
I wonder how he lived the rest of his unforeseen days.

Were his preparations any different than they’d been before?
It’s early March, and Easter will be here soon. Jesus, too,
realized how permeable the membrane is that keeps us

this side of death, and that the dead can come back
if they’re summoned. The ducks, the hawk and the heron

have passed on through to somewhere else,
but the joyful frogs remain crazy
with song. A hunter’s gunshots punctuate the distance,

a single crow lands in the crook of a tree, and it seems
as though the blessed rain has nearly stopped for now.

John Hoppenthaler
from domestic garden, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

John Hoppenthaler is Professor of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. For ten years, he served as Editor for A Poetry Congeries online journal, and he currently serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. domestic garden won the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 2015.

❦ ❦ ❦

what we find when we’re not looking

++++++ I was hiking the quiet ridge of pines
beyond Lake Kathleen. it felt so like a church then
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ that I knelt.

++++++ When I stood again, when I was able,
I found a woman’s Timex strapped around a limb,
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ thick as your wrist.

++++++ She’d been pacing – that much I could see –
and kept stopping at the watch’s face. Was time moving
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ slowly or quickly?

++++++ Late sun rolled from the valley. Rain
would surely come. No one – I called out once but no one.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ She looked over

++++++ nearly a dozen cabins, the bed and breakfast.
She could see the vacant day camp, the eagle’s nest. Things
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ were about to end,

++++++ and soon it would begin. It felt so like a church then
that she knelt, stood up, took off her watch and strapped it around
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ the branch. She

++++++ meant to free herself from time. It couldn’t last.
She lost her definition; time defines us. She was hiking
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ and lost her watch.

John Hoppenthaler
from domestic garden, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015

❦ ❦ ❦

the way to a man’s heart
+++ – for Christy

To sautéed garlic and onions I add
pureed plum tomatoes, a great splash
of good, red wine. Never cook with
wine you wouldn’t drink, someone
offered, and we agree. I pour a glass.
Later, I’ll add coarsely chopped basil
from the herb garden, sea salt, maybe
a pinch of sugar, and always the drizzle
of extra virgin.
++++++++++++ But now, as you see,
this extended metaphor is dissolving,
so I’m left with Pinot Noir and the glass,
fresh basil sprigs which remind me of you
And now there’s musing on the oil’s earthy flavor,
and not this aching hunger, and who is it
who says poetry makes nothing happen?