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Square Foot

September 22, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

 . 
[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
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
from This Art of Losing, BrickHouse Books, Baltimore, MD; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . ❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

Posted in Imagery | 4 Comments »

Neck and Neck

September 15, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

 . 
[with 3 poems by Jan LaPerle]
 . 
Cupboard
 . 
One day I decide I’ll do something
good for people,
but I forget, then I nap.
My daughter wants to make
lemon cake so we do that.
I stand on the stool
and begin this great hunt
for poppy seeds.
Hours pass, and I’m on my tiptoes.
I stop searching for a minute to listen
to the wind. The branches snapping.
My daughter ran off agin to her swing,
her swing tied to the branch
of the tree she climbs,
the tree run through with electric wires
in the yard she flies her kite in.
She flies it high as the cell tower.
Her dragon kite breathing fire.
Her dragon kite headed in a nosedive
straight into those electric lines.
I can’t do anything about anything.
I’m trapped in the cupboard
forgetting what I’m searching for.
I dust the spice tops; they go on forever.
My hair too tight in its bobby pins.
Here as good as any place to pray.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The dark and the light are neck and neck again. When dark creeps in the light just doesn’t seem to have much of a chance. This is a close as we come to living dangerously – taking a walk in the woods on an afternoon that promises thunderstorms. Today Linda and I are at Friendship Trail, part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail east of town. Such a lovely name – almost no one walks here but when we do cross paths the others always smile. Perhaps they’re filled with the same thoughts as the two of us: cool shade, gentle slopes, chuckling creek. Green welcome.
 . 
Only a lumpy heap of black sky to the north, that’s all we could see from the parking lot. For the moment sun slants through the pines and tuliptrees. Cicadas sing. Into our third mile, though, shadows begin to deepen and the leaves get nervous. We can still see blinks of blue straight up through the branches but dark is moving in, shouldering it all aside. A stick drops from height to land at my feet. Will a widow-maker be next?
 . 
What gives dark its edge? Why its power to blot out a cheery afternoon and replace it with foreboding? Dark needn’t even knock yet I open the door to it.
 . 
Dark 4 AM’s are worst although understandable: the hour when the soul’s earthly tether / gently uncoils its smoky grasp / as tenuous as breath.* If I awaken at such an hour I immediately implore myself, “Don’t think, don’t think of . . . ,” but so swiftly the dark lines up its charges, some sharp as yesterday, some rank with decades, some uncertain ever to arrive at all but all too easily imagined. Dark loves the quiet unprotected moment.
 . 
But why, then, into light and airy freedom of mind is dark also able to intrude? I discover myself on a rural highway, green tunnel and morning dew, but instead of anticipating certain joy around the next bend I am reliving random moments of my own stupidity or, worse, recreating injuries and insults in some delusion that this heaps coals upon the heads of my enemies. Not Buddha but someone apparently equally enlightened said that to hold a grudge is to drink poison while imagining it will kill your foes. Here I am fueling the dark with anti-matter I’ve brought to the bonfire myself. This negativity, what could be more precisely the opposite of experiencing life in the moment? I open dark’s door myself.
 . 
Take a deep breath. Give my heart a good airing. No blame, no shame, just look straight up through the branches and accept what you see. Gray now, but not black. Threatening gusts have settled back to cooling breeze; just a few cold drops on my neck and no more. Here is the edge of the woods, the field, our car up ahead. Linda and I say, as we tend to, “Well, we carried our umbrellas and that’s what kept it from raining on us.” For a stretch it seemed neck and neck, but even so this hour has been full of green welcome. If at this moment we were instead dripping, shoes aslosh, about to shiver, we could still likely bring ourselves to say, even as we are about to now, “That was a wonderful walk.”
 . 
❦
 . 
The dark and the light are neck and neck again. So they seem to be in every poem by Jan LaPerle. Maybe the Land Sings Back is not a book of platitudes and happy endings. In fact, this is the anti-platitude book. But neither do these lines ever surrender to unremitting darkness. Despair dances with hope even if they are both stepping on each other’s feet. Gray sadness cracks and a thin bright line of joy refracts into color down the wall. These poems accept the small daily trials we might think inconsequential as well as the towering existential anxieties we have to admit if we are alive in this century. These poems offer us the chance to share all of these and in doing so they invite us to become more human.
 . 
Many of these poems are constructed as a series of observations. No, not observations, not apart from the experience but within the experience: these poems are a series of lived moments. Our image of the writer – her age and circumstance, her partner and parent relationships, what she fears and what she loves – is not constructed from what we are told or shown but from sharing the experiences as she does. She struggles to find meaning. So do we. She is surprised that a small act can dispel loneliness or that a small memory can carry a huge weight of joy. We experience surprise at the very moment she does. I have been blown through this collection by a wind of anticipation and revelation and promise. At the end I am simply convinced that, even though neck and neck, the dark doesn’t have much of a chance.

 . . 

❦
 . 
Maybe the Land Sings Back, Jan LaPerle, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022. Jan LaPerle lives in Kentucky with her husband and daughter, and is a master sergeant in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox. Galileo Press was founded in 1979 by Julia Wendell and Jack Stephens, now lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and also publishes the journal Free State Review.
 . 
[* from Circadian (Welcome Morning) by Bill Griffin, published 2005 in Bay Leaves by the Poetry Council of North Carolina and collected in Crossing the River, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2017)]
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Dear Tuth Fary
 . 
This is the beginning of my
daughter’s letter, and in it folds
a tiny tooth, small as the foot of the mouse
we caught this morning in a trap
that looks like a hallway to heaven.
The light at the end illuminating a dollop
of peanut butter, heaven enough
for the mouse who was still alive,
still zipping its stringy tail back and forth
across the hardwood. My daughter
and I went outside to set it free, left the tea
warm on the counter, the teabag
with one of those little paper sayings,
The earth laughs in flowers, but there’s no laughing here,
just ice creeping across everything, making us feel
even more zippered-in, my daughter
on the threshold right before the cry.
She could go either way, and this is always
up to me to maneuver. So I make up some life
for this mouse to get back to, some little car,
tiny house, little teacup tinier than a mouse tooth.
Isn’t it all so cute? Isn’t it great, how I can
hold the world in the light like this?
I cannot talk to her about why the mouse
went in there, the temptation, peanut butter
and loneliness, the pinhole of light in all the darkness,
like when she woke in the middle of the night
and came to my door to say, so sweetly, Hi mama,
which I snuffed out quickly with all my middle-aged
darkness. Midnight breath its own nightmare.
In the morning, I go to my coffee, my office
in the attic where I belong, and the squirrels
scrabble across the shingles and we laugh a little,
we being me and the comic part of me that
pops her head through the skylight to talk
to the critters above and below, and I can hear
it all from there. The inconsequential-ness
of my life is a cinch on my heart. The sweetness, too,
of my little girl growing in the most beautiful person
I have ever seen. That’s enough.
The dark and the light are neck and neck again.
I am freezing from my heart up.
I am right here, rooting from the window.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Big Quiet Things
 . 
Forever we remember her
on our way to the coast,
in the back seat, quiet
for a million miles,
watching movies with
headphones on and
then, as if a word were
a thing, as if quiet
were an ocean,
and out of it: CRAB!
And years now later,
my husband can say it
or I can say it,
and we are warmed together
even when all around us,
sinking us, pulling us under,
a riptide. And it feels
impossible. And there’s
nothing to hold onto.
Silence for a million miles.
Then out of it
a word, and then more where
that one came from,
all washing up, and the sun
warm, the sand
here with us,
waiting with us.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

Posted in family, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Expected and Unexpected

September 8, 2023 by GriffinPoetry

 . 
[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.
 . 
FATES: The Medea Notebooks / Starfish Wash-Up / overflow of an unknown self. Ann Pedone, Katherine Soniat, D. M. Spitzer. Etruscan Press, Wilkes-Barre, PA, © 2021.
 .
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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