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Unsettled – Jodi Barnes

March 24, 2012 by GriffinPoetry

I’ve lived in this little town for thirty-one years, but almost every day someone still asks me, “Where you from?”  I don’t tell them.  Maybe if I’m not in my long-suffering persona at the moment I might just say, “Here.”  And move on.  Or I might sidestep with, “How far back do you mean?” and if they press then I inform them that my Griffin forebears moved down here from Virginia to Union County (near Charlotte) before the Revolution.  Or I might go on the offensive: “All my folks are from around here,” with further ammunition that my Mom grew up in Winston-Salem and Dad in Hamlet.

But I never tell them where I was actually born.  That would end the conversation.  Because what they’re really saying is, “You ain’t from around here, are you?”  And I’ll be damned if I’m going to confirm it.

Why?  What’s the big deal?  Afraid of being labeled a Yankee?  It’s not as if there aren’t fifty other things besides my pure midwestern accent that brand me an outsider in this rural county.  Not Baptist.  Not Republican.  Not a football fan.  Not a Tarheel (although I have no compunction about letting my Carolina friends know I went to Duke).

No, I’m not running away from the things I’m not.  I”m running toward what I long to be.  Not exactly a state of being, but a state of belonging.

I belong to North Carolina and it belongs to me.  I’ve slept on the ground in its forests and mountains.  I’ve drunk from its streams.  I’ve planted trees here.  I can recite its toast: Here’s to the land of the longleaf pine . . . .  I’ve lived in a lot of other towns and a lot of other states, but this is the one I need to accept me and take me in and hold me.  Maybe it’s exactly because I lived in so many different places growing up – I need some place where I belong.

So I won’t apologize for getting defensive when someone tries to imply I’m not from around here.  Just take heart all you folks who have moved more than twenty miles from the place where you were born.  Even if your great x 10 grandfather didn’t live here, you can belong.  Just put down a taproot of love, and when someone asks where you’re from, you tell them, “Right here, damn it.”

.     .     .     .

Moving – I couldn’t help but get agitated about all those moves after reading that Jodi Barnes has moved at least twenty-four times in her life, as far as she can remember.  Her book Unsettled keeps returning to that theme, the quest for belonging.  Of course there are the boxes packed, unpacked, repacked, and their tangible artifacts of memory.  We can’t let go of things because we can’t bear to be cut off from our past.  Memories – are they really roots that are strong enough to feed us?  Is home what we’ve left behind or where we long to arrive?

Jodi’s poems reveal so many things left behind.  Love: we thought it was real, but it has moved on without us.  Lives: that pack our hearts long after we’ve lost them.  So many false steps and false starts that may end with us feeling cut off.  Is there any hope for us wayfaring strangers to finally discover our home?  The gods of metaphor; the dirt beneath our feet; the persona of myth we don like an astonished cloak; all those things that leave us feeling uncertain and longing.  Everything unsettled.  And yet . . .

.     .     .     .     .

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Pretend Pioneer

My friends ask, are you moved in yet?
They mean is my stuff unpacked;
am I settled?
I envision wagon wheels,
mail-order brides, the frontier.

But here my sole risk is to trip
over cardboard,
the clutter of privilege.

Once I unwrap what I thought I’d need,
I circle camps of chattel on a polished floor,
stretch the metaphor of expansion,
contrast this mansion with teepee
desire – its flapping door.

Next time I’ll answer Hell No –
I got to keep moving.

.     .     .     .     .

The Hardness of Cardboard Philosophy

Memories hide beneath cardboard wings,
seek solace against worn seams.
Last night, I dreamed this box
grew feathers and flew away.

But it stays, obeys gravity,
reminds me of a frayed decision:
to face the weight or leave this matter
to tidy imagination.

I think I remember why it’s no use
to ply back flaps on time capsules.
It’s the same stuff.  Pixies don’t exist.
And there is no magic in this dust.

Yet something pulls me to the drab,
unrelenting, rectangular shape,
my arms extend, my fingers bend
to search breaches in brittle tape.

Strands of hair, stale baby’s breath,
baptismal candle, eyelet gown,
first tooth, proof of life –
unmoved, they stare me down.

As I try to keep them dry,
not mourn her past, the missed –
angelic imps resist my wish; the box sits.
Another blurred present flies by.

From Unsettled, (c) 2010, Jodi Barnes, Main Street Rag Publishing

.     .     .     .     .

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With his masters in chemical engineering, my Dad got a job with Western Electric straight out of Georgia Tech.  I was born in Niagara Falls, the American side.

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Pro Re Nata

March 17, 2012 by GriffinPoetry

“As needed?”

When I left the hospital last Saturday night a fat Vidalia moon was just peering through the trees that circle the campus.  There were two cars and a pickup in the visitors’ lot.  Lined up on the front bumper of a dented black Civic were three of those deer blasters, chrome-plastic gizmos four inches long that look like little jet engines.  When you’re driving sixty they’re supposed to emit an ultrasonic whistle that spooks the deer so they don’t jump in front of your car.  Gives you an idea of the kind of traffic concerns we contend with out here in Surry County.

As I crossed to the lower lot (there was only one car at the far end – mine) I glimpsed movement.  I stopped and turned.  A grey fox trotted across the pavement.  Ignoring me.  It sauntered into the bushes at the perimeter of the landscaping and never made a sound or quickened its step.  Time to spring forward.

The big trees are still bare but this week the cherries blossomed.  Canada geese in the hospital pond have paired off.  Sunday morning I saw a pair of hooded mergansers and a wood duck eyeing each other near the nesting boxes I donated a couple of years ago.  How long until fuzzy chicks leap unafraid from the nesting cavity and plop into the water like tennis balls?  Everything is precisely as it should be.

What is needed?

Some day soon – five years?  ten? – I’ll make evening rounds for the last time.  There are plenty of things I’ll miss.  The Monday mornings after a long weekend on call.  Clowning around with the nurses – walk the halls with a big mug that says “DUKE” if you want to start a civil war.  My partners: sitting down to puzzle out a confusing patient; cracking each other up with the deadly black humor that makes you shut the door of the conference room.  And of course my patients.  Figuring out what they need and being right a lot of the time.  Figuring out who they are.  Figuring out who we are together.

And I wouldn’t even mention that there are plenty of things I won’t miss, except that they fall into the category of things-that-piss-me-off and are mostly the same for everyone who has survived into the twenty-first century: mindless productivity-sapping bureaucracy; people that manipulate and take advantage of you; being unappreciated, or underappreciated.

But there’s one more thing I really won’t miss.  Although it makes me irritable (ask Brenda and Carolyn at the office), it isn’t having to think about ten things at once – adrenalin just primes the pump, after all. It isn’t even the 3 a.m. calls from worried mothers – hell, that’s what I signed on for.  And it isn’t fear, although there have been plenty of crisis situations when I’ve been scared, and I don’t like that.  That thing I will be most glad to put behind me is something I might name “malignant uncertainty.”  I don’t know what comes next, I’m not sure what to do, but if I don’t make a decision in the next thirty seconds something real bad is going to happen.  Close corollary – I’ve given the order, the die is cast, and now I will sit and watch the outcome for minutes, hours.  Will this baby’s breathing slow to normal?  Will this old woman’s blood pressure come back up?  Will somebody hold my hand?

What do I need?

Besides another weekend off?  A couple of hours to write these lines?  An insight bright enough to make sense of it all?  A moon that pours through the branches while the fox and I pause to listen to spring peepers?

Will I figure it out before I’ve missed it?

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Painted Trillium

.     .     .     .     .

The Geriatrician Ages

They don’t fly up at him, all these names,
no confusion of pigeons’ wings
in the parking lot; they don’t lock arms
            to block him entering
the next exam room;
maybe they awaken him near dawn
but not by shaking. More like
            the powdery flutter
of a moth disturbed in daylight,
the mute gray snowfall
of ash from burning newsprint.

Many he can’t recall, but all of them
he recognizes when their dry lips
whisper their presence
            from the other side –
not accusations (their ease of passing
one more benediction
of his calling), not really thanks
            though most are grateful,
mostly just an airy I . . . I
in his cluttered bag of memories.

So many, so often now, more and more.
Each murmur a spirit body bowed
into a wheelchair, curled mantis-like
            in bed, pushing against a walker,
each of them pushing, pushing
against what held them here
and what let them go.
            Some days he can’t remember
if he last saw them on evening rounds
or in a dream, and any moment
he expects the office door to open:
            one will enter, speak
his name, one he had thought
was gone.

.     .     .     .     .

first published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 304, No. 16, p.1754,  October 27, 2010

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A World in Three Lines – Adrian Rice

March 11, 2012 by GriffinPoetry

“In case of nuclear attack, hide underneath the toilet.  No one’s ever hit it yet.”

On the wall above the commode, that’s the hand-lettered sign you get to read while you take aim and take a leak.  Assuming you’re standing – it’s a unisex bathroom.  To find it I had to ask directions of the forty-ish woman behind the register in the little convenience store: through the store room, take a right, last door.  I’m running ahead of schedule and have stopped for gas about a mile above the Catawba River (and I hate to arrive anywhere and have to ask first thing, “May I use your restroom?”).  Looked like it couldn’t be more than another mile or two from here to the Bethlehem Branch Library where I’d come to hear Adrian Rice read.

For the wanderer in search of literary respite, what a haven.  A simple well-lit temple to words.  Bethlehem Branch is across the county line from Hickory, so all those who cross this threshhold must do so intentionally and filled with expectation.

After we set up chairs, the head librarian showed me around: cozy spots for curling up with a book; windows, lots of natural light on winter afternoons; the current month’s art on display, evocative scenes by a local photographer; each photo accompanied by a poem written by a local poet inspired by that specific shot.  And now the library is officially closed but the door keeps swinging open.  Twenty or thirty souls arrive to share poetry, each of them intentional and filled with expectation.

In case of nuclear attack, head for the library.  Might as well pass through the pearly gates with a crowd you wouldn’t mind accompanying into eternity.

.     .     .     .    .

I’d never heard Adrian Rice read his poetry before this night.  But who could resist that soft accent, as smooth and deep as kelly moss and inviting as a tall glass of dark amber?  The first thing he said was, “It’s a disaster to ask an Irishman to read for twenty minutes.  The introduction to the first poem will be twenty minutes!”

How can it be, then, that Adrian has written a book of haiku?  He shared with us several from his collection Hickory Haiku.  Oh sure, before each poem he gave us a build-up that was probably ten times seventeen syllables, but the secret to the Ulster lad’s three-line epics is to sit down and read the book through.  Fifty terse images from a man far from home and almost as far from boyhood.  Lines as quick and sharp as a turning latch.  Connections longed for, connections discovered.  The green hills left behind and the new hills that have become home.  The strangeness of nature, the nature of people, perhaps not so strange after all.  The deepwater anchor of porch, books, family.  Taken together, these are poems that link arms to tell a grand story with a wink and a prayer, worthy of an Irishman.

.     .     .     .     .

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II

We Irish aren’t wooed
by weather.  But, for folk here,
it’s a love affair

VIII

Night-winds lay the corn
rows low.  Morning, they rise –
foals finding their feet.

IX

Olde Hickory Tap
Room – draught handles are beer-bows
that target the Thirst.

XIX

The sun’s done gone.  Dark
ink surges through sky water –
a storm’s a-comin’!

XXVI

Two contrails cross in
the royal sky – the airy,
brave flag of Scotland.

XXVII

Like found poems, the bare
necessities of home – Heinz
beans & Weetabix!

XLII

We whinny and neigh,
two rocking horses grazing
the pasture of porch

.     .     .     .     .

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Adrian Rice teaches English at Catawba Valley Comunity College.  Turning poetry into lyrics, he has also teamed up with Hickory-based and fellow Belfastman, musician/songwriter Alan Mearns, to form ‘The Belfast Boys’, a dynamic Irish Traditional Music duo.  Listen to him read at the book launch for Hickory Haiku.

Thanks to Bud Caywood for organizing the monthly art and the annual poetry readings at Bethlehem Branch Library, and thanks to all the staff and regulars.

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