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Ear Worm #1A

August 16, 2024 by GriffinPoetry

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[with poems from Duet by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar]
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Listening to Paul Simon
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Such a brave generation.
We marched onto the streets
in our T-shirts and jeans, holding
the hand of the stranger next to us
with a trust I can’t summon now,
our voices raised in song.
Our rooms were lit by candlelight,
wax dripping on the table, then
onto the floor, leaving dusty
starbursts we’d pop off
with the edge of a butter knife
when it was time to move.
But before we packed and drove
into the middle of our lives
we watched the leaves outside
the window shift in the wind
and listened to Paul Simon,
his tindery voice, then fell back
into our solitude, leveled our eyes
on the American horizon
that promised us everything
and knew it was never true:
smoke and cinders, insubstantial
as fingerprints on glass.
It isn’t easy to give up hope,
to escape a dream. We shed
our clothes and cut our hair,
our former beauty piled at our feet.
And still the music lived inside us,
whole worlds unmaking us in the dark,
so that sleeping and waking we heard
the train’s distant whistle, steel
trestles shivering across the land
that was still our in our bones and hearts,
its lone headlamp searching the weedy
stockyards, the damp, gray rags of fog.
 . 
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
from Duet, Jacar Press, Durham, NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Here I am again, six years old this time, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the pinnacle of 1959 technology. I wind it up, carefully lay the 6-inch plastic disc on the little turntable (it’s bright yellow plastic, I will never forget that), and position the needle at the outer groove. The wind-up box is white and red and has a picture of Mickey Mouse grinning; it looks like Mickey’s arm is what holds the stylus. The needle itself juts from a hollow flat cylinder, sort of like a tuna can with perforations; the little holes are what transmit the sound. No electronics, no electricity involved.
 . 
I push a lever and the disk begins to rotate. The needle finds its groove (at least a decade before finding one’s groove will mean anything to me) and in between all the scratches from a hundred earlier renditions – music! The little record finishes, I lift the needle from where it’s begun making little whump whump sounds with each revolution, I place the needle back at groove one, and it starts all over again.
 . 
And even so my mother remained sane to her dying day.
 . 
As the years passed, Mom and Dad began to let me listen to their records on the Hi-Fi (mono, not stereo; Uncle Carlyle soldered it himself). It never seemed to drive them crazy to hear Peter and the Wolf or The Music Man a dozen times a day, or even Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife. Hard core. Finally the big day – I was 11, I had saved my birthday money, I had laid awake at night tallying which of their songs were included: I bought my first LP, Introducing . . . The Beatles.
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Introducing . . . is an anomaly in Beatles discography. It was released by Vee-Jay Records because Capitol/EMI had farted around about agreeing to a first USA Beatles album and Vee-Jay scooped them. Apparently it was only on the market for a year or so before the suits prevailed and forced them to cease and desist. Anyhow, I listened to that vinyl disc about a thousand times before I bought Beatles ‘65. In fact, I might just go slap it on the old turntable right now. Scratches and all. Please, please me!
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❦
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And that little yellow record? Easter Parade. Sixty-five years later I still find no evidence that there has ever been such a parade, but now the melody has wormed it’s way in again: “In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it . . .” And even so, my mother somehow remained sane.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
Mick Jagger (World Tour, 2008)
 . 
He stands on stage
after spot-lit stage, yowling
with his rubber mouth. If you
turn off the sound he’s
a ruminating bovine,
a baby’s face tasting his first
sour orange or spitting
spooned oatmeal out.
Rugose cheeks and beef
jerky jowls, shrubby hair
waxed, roughed up, arms
slung dome-ward, twisted
branches of a tough tree, knees
stomping high as his sunken chest.
Oddities aside, he’s a hybrid
of stamina and slouch,
tummy pooch, pouches under
his famous invasive rolling eyes.
He flutters like the pages
of a dirty book, doing
the sombrero dance, rocking
the microphone’s
round black foot, one hand
gripping the skinny metal rod,
the other pumping its victory fist
like he’s flushing a chain toilet.
Old as the moon and sleek
as a puma circling the herd.
The vein in this forehead
pops. His hands drop into fists.
he bows like a beggar then rises
like a monarch. Sir Mick,
our bony ruler. Jagger, slumping
off stage shining with sweat.
O please don’t die. Not now,
not ever, not yet.
 . 
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
from Duet, Jacar Press, Durham, NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Uno Voce – when Sandy Beam rehearsed an a capella selection, he required us to blend our tone with each person singing near us until it was as if we all sang with one voice. Vibrato is anathema; sibilance is sin! Of course, Sandy would have been happiest if we had all been boy sopranos, but at least we could strive for that brilliant transparent evocation of light he desired.
 . 
Light and truth evoked by a single voice – not at all unlike these poems in Duet. They are each about music – Bo Diddley, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Cher. They build a portrait in layers of color, tone, and years, filled with the music that infuses our past and vibrates in our bones to create our present. And they are written by the duet of Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, but the tones and melodies blend until we readers hear a single voice.
 . 
Not an ear worm in the bunch.
 . 
❦
 . 
Duet is one in the continuation of the Greatest Hits Series, originally conceived by editor Jennifer Bosveld at Pudding House Press in 2000 and acquired by Sammy Greenspan of Kattywampus Press in 2010. Jacar Press was asked to take over the series under the careful eye of series editor David Rigsbee in 2017. More about the book, the Series, and Jacar Press HERE
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Posted in family, music | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments »

Clara Jean

August 9, 2024 by GriffinPoetry

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Night Shift in the Home for Convalescents
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There is much in this drawer that is no longer in use:
a notebook with ribbon to mark passages
once of some importance, a tortoiseshell comb sadly
made of tortoise shell, a prayer book bound
in mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl.
And sounds: a blurring of bees in the air
no longer heard in the wild.
Everything at once, she had said. All that you
remember must be written down.
Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring
beyond the windscreens, lilacs soon to lie on the ground.
There was a quickening in the heart whenever I saw him
standing in a field of bloom and hum then suddenly not there.
The field gone. The house. The road now under a newer road.
Trees along it long cut down. No canopy of hope.
And the swamp? Who knows what became of it.
Skunk cabbage and buttercups, cattails,
polliwogs and crayfish with their pulse-train song.
We caught them in jars of pond water.
Not for eating, no. To watch them live.
Wash your mother’s clothes one last time and put them away—
like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.
 . 
Carolyn Forché
from You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón and published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress; 50 new poems by 53 contemporary poets; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
There I am, the four-year old peeking around the kitchen door while two women fry chicken, my Nana and the person she is calling ‘Clara Jean’. Uncle Carlyle passes through, nabs a crispy crackling from the platter, says, “Mmm, good, Sister.” I’ve heard cousins and aunts call her ‘Sister’, too, but I know her real name – Mommy.
 . 
By 1949, when Clara Jean Cooke had her first date with Wilson who would become my father, everyone around her knew her as ‘Cookie’. Everyone at church; all her Reynold’s High School friends; the roommates, pals, and profs at Women’s College – ‘Cookie’. It was her name, stuck fast for eight decades, although sometime in the 1990’s my little sister Mary Ellen would christen her ‘Big Momso’ and we’d trot that one out for a joke on birthday cards and such.
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Now I’m shaking hands at the open house eleven days after Mom’s death. Neighbors, caregivers, a cousin’s family, her Sunday school: “Cookie was a dear friend.” “Cookie had the sweetest smile every time I saw her.” “Cookie was so special to us.” I’m nodding and smiling and shaking the next hand, and they are all so right. The kindest, the dearest, the funniest and funnest; the most talented to ever pick up chalk and create a perfect likeness; the brightest to ever pick up pencil and defeat the NY Times Crossword; the best to ever fry up a pullet crispy and juicy. The Cookiest.
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❦
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After the guests have trickled away and Dad is conked out in his hospital bed, Mary Ellen and I are in the kitchen stowing leftovers in the fridge and bagging the trash. Mom is peeking around the kitchen door. Nana and Carlyle died in another century – there’s no one left to call her Clara Jean or Sister. Mom’s middle son is two time zones distant. It’s just her and her eldest and youngest here. I lean against the stove. Mary Ellen is drying her hands. All the busyness of the past two weeks pauses long enough for us to take deep breaths and begin to tell stories about our Mother.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Clara Cooke Griffin
February 24, 1928  – July 23, 2024
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Clara “Cookie” Griffin, 96, died peacefully at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on July 23, 2024, surrounded by the love of her family. She was born in Winston-Salem on February 24, 1928, to Ellen McBride Cooke and Grady Carlyle Cooke MD. Cookie is preceded in death by her parents and her two brothers, Sammie and Carlyle. She is survived by her husband Eugene Wilson Griffin Jr;  her children Bill (Linda), Bob (Kathy), and Mary Ellen (Wendy); her grandchildren Josh (Allison), Margaret (Josh), Natalie, Lauren, and Claire; her great-grandchildren Saul, Amelia, and Bert; and her much loved cousin Michael Childs (Pam) and family.
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Cookie was an accomplished, caring, and creative woman throughout her life. She was the first woman in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree, majoring in art at UNC Greensboro (then known as Women’s College of North Carolina), graduating with the class of 1949. After college she returned to Winston-Salem, where she worked professionally as a medical illustrator, and soon met her husband Wilson on a blind date. They married in 1950 and moved several times for his career, living in Atlanta GA, Niagra Falls NY, Memphis TN, Farmington MI, Aurora OH, and twice in Wilmington DE. Cookie became a full-time mother when her children were born. She continued her art as an avocation and also enriched the family’s life with music and a love of reading and education. She shared her love of gardening and the outdoors and taught her children the names of every bird at the feeder, but perhaps the greatest gift she shared has been her eternally optimistic and encouraging spirit.
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In her 40’s, Cookie obtained a second bachelor’s degree in early childhood education at Kent State University. She was especially gifted working with young children and served as a beloved kindergarten and first grade teacher in the Aurora Public Schools for over ten years. She practiced an educational philosophy called The Open Classroom. Observers were amazed to see twenty or more 5- or 6-year olds in one room, quietly and simultaneously engaged in small group activities including art, science, and reading corner! When she and Wilson moved again to Wilmington, DE, she continued working in early education conducting preschool reading readiness assessments for the public school system.
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In retirement, Cookie continued to pursue her artistic talent. She took classes to develop her craft, and her media spanned pencil drawing, charcoal, pastels, acrylics, and oils. Her subjects included plein aire, landscapes, still life, figure painting, abstracts, and always portraits. Her grandchildren and great nieces and nephews benefitted from her gifts with art and early education, both as subjects of her paintings and with hands-on instruction: she always had art projects at the ready for the children when they visited the family’s summer home on Bogue Banks at the North Carolina coast! Throughout her life, even into her 90’s, Cookie frequently drew or painted portraits of children or pets as gifts for family, friends, and community groups. These works of art are cherished by many as mementoes of Cookie’s creativity, generosity, and her love for children and animals.
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In 2012, Cookie and Wilson returned to Winston-Salem. They renewed friendships dating to Cookie’s elementary school years, made new friends with neighbors in their South Marshall Street community, and joined First Presbyterian Church, where they especially loved their Adult Sunday School Class. Cookie’s life-long love of music, which had included playing piano for her young family, now expanded to enjoying violin performances by her granddaughters and regular attendance at the Winston-Salem Symphony. Throughout her life, the joy of family was paramount to Cookie, and in her final decades she spent many happy hours visiting with and sharing stories about her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We who love her will continue telling her stories.
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The family wishes to thank all those who have loved and supported Cookie in recent years and months, including friends, neighbors, and the dedicated and talented caregivers at Bayada Home Health, Home Helpers of the Crystal Coast, and Trellis Supportive Care. A memorial service has been planned for September 29.
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Thank you to my sibs, Mary Ellen and Bob, for assisting in the composition of this obituary. Thank you to poet friend Suzanne Bell for sending me this poem by Carolyn Forché and recommending You Are Here by Ada Limón. As I was tidying up to prepare for Mom’s memorial open house, I happened to look in the top drawer of her dressing table. Beads, earrings, one silk glove – Mom would have been able to come up with any number of words for the collection there. Oddments. Hodgepodge. Gallimaufry. Maybe even Omnium-gatherum, such a nice ring to it. I gazed at the contents for the span of three or four deep breaths. I closed the drawer. Later.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Posted in family | Tagged , , | 31 Comments »

Treats

August 2, 2024 by GriffinPoetry

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[with 3 poems by AE Hines]
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A foot of new snow
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and down the middle
+++++ of our icy street
a dawn congregation
+++++ of ravens, all blue-black
and wing, hunch
+++++ in their strange bureaucracy,
as if arrived to divide
+++++ the daily assignments. Even
at this age, I still see signs. Even
+++++ a gathering of black birds
on a snow-covered road,
+++++ a Rorschach test
that conjures a warning
+++++ in my anxious machinery:
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an assembly of plague doctors –
+++++ with folded feather arms, dark
nodding heads. I wonder what
+++++ they are here to tell me.
None of us is promised green lights
+++++ and straightaways, but sometimes
the bloodwork comes back
+++++ quietly, the tumor
benign. Sometimes, just up the road
+++++ from where you lie in bed,
brakes give way and barrel
+++++ a terrified trucker across four
frozen lanes into your
+++++ could-have-been path.
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AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Imagine you really like to eat. No, I don’t mean you enjoy sitting down at the table, plate in front of you, bite by bite, chew & swallow, push away and say, “That was good!” What I’m talking about is when your eldest son calls and asks, “How’re you doin’?”, the first thing out of your mouth is, “For supper I had . . .”
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It’s a blessing that Dad likes to eat. My experience from forty years of geriatric practice is that once you lose your appetite you’re going to have a tough time ever finding it again. The first thing Dad usually brings up when we talk is what he needs me to pick up at the store. He’s thinking two meals ahead, tonight’s supper, tomorrow’s breakfast. He can’t walk as far as the kitchen any more, he can’t rummage through the cupboards or the fridge, in fact there may not be many things left in life for him to enjoy, but he can think about something good to eat.
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That’s why this morning I’m poking around in the freezer and shifting unidentifiables in the back of the refrigerator, holding a shopping list and a yellow pad. Besides chucking out the old and vaguely greenish, I’m making Dad a list. A “MENU” I’ll leave at his bedside. There’s a column for meals in the fridge, a column for freezer, and at the bottom is that most important header of all: TREATS. I found four kinds of cookies in the pantry. Four flavors of pudding we originally bought for Mom. Chocolate brownies with M&M’s his cousin June brought by. Some zucchini bread a neighbor dropped off (and it is good). Please don’t forget the Trader Joe’s Vanilla Ice Cream.
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From here, then, it’s off to Harris Teeter. I’m sure I’ll see some more things Dad would like as I cruise the aisles. They say the olfactory sense is tightly cross-linked to the hippocampus – a familiar smell instantly evokes vivid memories of old associations. I suspect for Dad the gustatory sense is equally evocative. Maybe he needs a little country ham with red eye gravy. Maybe spoon bread or hushpuppies. Maybe I can find the recipe for Mom’s famous German chocolate cake.
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In our final days, may we all treat ourselves to what brings us joy.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Eden
 . 
I recall placing ripe plantain on the lowest
branch of eucalyptus, and the tree
filling with small wings: toucans
and motmots, a flock of miniature finches
dusted with pale blue chalk. There are so few
days I would – if I could – set on repeat
and live over and over:
+++++++++++++++++ Here, the man
I love, sight of him a reviving breath,
carrying plates of chorizo and fried eggs.
Then the two of us reclined in dappled grass,
drinking hot chocolate from a single,
chipped cup beneath prehistoric ferns
that tower and sway just as they must have
with the world still new.
+++++++++++++++++ I like to pretend
then too – didn’t I? – that we were the first
and last of our kind, a multitude
of wings beating the air under a sun
that never set, our queer, middle-aged bodies
never a day older.
 . 
AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Some quiet evenings I go out / to sit with them, all the men / I’ve been . . .
 . 
When has there ever been an evening that quiet? A space filled with invitation and empty of demands? When has my mind ever been that pliant, willing to contemplate such things much less able? Is there a garden somewhere waiting for each of us, waiting for our return?
 . 
Adam in the Garden by AE Hines offers no simple answers but it certainly invites questions. These poems span many years and many situations; even more so they span the many conditions of one human person. Broken and reborn, dead and exalted – you nor I are not one immutable creature, none of us an unvarying beam transiting the years allotted to our individual existence. If we discover a quiet moment and stop to think, we may discover the many persons we have been and are being.
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Where could there be such a quiet space? Turn the page. Again. The poet invites us to join him here. He makes himself vulnerable to our gaze. He makes no other demand on us than to enter the quiet with him, to be with him and with our selves. And truthfully, I confess that I need this! I need the quieting of all those voices, external but really mainly internal, the quieting which is required to read a poem. Not to escape myself but to sit down with myself. Thank you for the invitation and for the welcome. Thank you for the sharing. It is, I assure you, a treat.
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❦
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Adam in the Garden by AE Hines is published by Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts, Inc., through Charlotte Lit Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Green Satin
 . 
++++++++++++++for Ginny
 . 
Perhaps, it’s not the drugs
when you tell me you plan
to come back as a tree, wearing
 . 
green satin gowns and scarves
made of wind. No more ridiculous,
you say, than dying, or your wig
 . 
teetering from the nightstand.
Last night, a cypress lifted its dark
roots from the earth, and lay down
 . 
Like a great, leafy-maned beast
across your yard, making room
for more morning
 . 
to flood your window, dawn
a spotlight across a hospice bed
where you labor over breathing,
 . 
a potter over clay, spinning
and kneading the mud of yourself
into finer and finer pieces.
 . 
“It must be time,” you tell me,
with summer’s sun shining
and sparrows flinging
 . 
shadows on your walls.
When even the cypress lies down
and points the way home.
 . 
AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Posted in Imagery, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

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