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Elemental – Scott Owens

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2025| 4 Comments »

 . 
after rain the hills
fill up with mist, everything
else just memory
 . 
[poetry by Scott Owens]
 . 
Elemental
 . 
Having been raised in shadow of pecan trees
he learned to keep his insecurities
concealed in shells the color of earth, almost
inextricable and gathered in brown paper bags.
 . 
Having been shaped by twisted logic of weather
in South Carolina’s Tornado Alley,
he learned when to move with wind and when
to stand fast and howl against the blow.
 . 
Having been dipped in yellow water
without being held by anything but current
he learned to sink to the bottom, plant his feet
in mud below and walk back to shore.
 . 
Having been burned in fires of passion and forgiveness,
faith and disbelief, he learned to trust little
but what he could see: bird flight, dirt
beneath the nails, quiet eternity of mountain.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Where is the transition point between cluttered and ungodly mess? I gave up long ago any hope of keeping my desktop tidy or my bookshelves neatly organized. For the past year, however, the normal books and papers and camera gear have been invaded and overcome by bins, boxes, and bags. Here’s a sampling:
file boxes of my parents’ financial and tax records, 2023 to present;
banker’s boxes of photos I’m bound and determined to sort, 1920’s and even earlier;
crumbling carton of 35 mm home movies shot by Grandpop, who died in 1958;
and before I totally blame Mom and Dad, one chair is completely full of books and magazines I’ve read or intend to, and the other chair is completely loaded with gear, field guides, and two dozen clip boards with botanical checklists I’ll hand out at my next naturalist walk in a week.
 . 
And one other thing among so many others that have not yet discovered or been granted their ultimate place of repose: a heavy oak urn containing my mother’s ashes.
 . 
The urn I will keep close and heft from time to time. Is any of this other stuff really essential? I don’t believe I will ever lose the picture in my head of Mom on her bicycle, luminous smile, age 11 – perhaps these boxes don’t hold anything that can surpass that memory. I can’t conceive of a meaningful life that doesn’t include a camera in my hand, but after all I can only hold one at a time. And the books! I’m planning to surprise thirty or so friends with a (comfortably read) book for Poetry Month, but the groaning weight of the remainder will scarcely feel the loss.
 . 
Whelm: To cover, submerge, engulf or bury; to overcome. Why have I made myself responsible for these accumulations? Am I their curator, conservator, salvager? Or do I expect this stuff to somehow save me? Buried by the non-essential all around me, perhaps I can thrash and claw my way through while I ignore my own ultimate burial.
 . 
In a minute perhaps I’ll withdraw my hands from typing, swivel away from the screen, actually open one of these bins and boxes. Maybe I’ll chuck a dusty double handful in the trash. But maybe I’ll pull out a talisman that opens my soul to more luminous memories. I will smile and share what I’ve found. It will be a treasure not of precious metal or envious resale value but because of the door it opens. A sliver of light finds its way through and reveals one moment that has made meaning in this life. A moment that still has meaning. Not the old material stuff but the memories it carries on its back: from something here I might discover something new about myself, the ones I love, this overwhelming life. I might find something essential.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Of Mint and Memory
 . 
The smell of mint makes everything feel clean,
clears the senses like bells ringing,
or wind chimes, maybe, on a summer day
in 1973, after the war but before
the bomb became too real a thing to ignore.
 . 
They say that smell is our most powerful sense,
not the strongest, not the one
we use the most, but the one we find
closest to memory and feeling, the one
most difficult to ignore, resist, overcome.
 . 
I’ve given up patches of my yard to mint
so I’ll always have it for tea,
for homemade chocolate chip ice cream,
for the times I need to go back to days
when I didn’t know enough to be afraid.
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Linda listening to Fauré while she reads. A brown thrasher sneaking into the holly just outside my window. Lacing up for another afternoon walk in the woods. I could list a dozen necessary things that have intruded on this morning, but if I take a deep breath and reflect on what is essential those first three seem like a good start. Last night we drove by a church signboard with this suggestion: “Do one thing today that makes the world a better place.” Essential. I would add, “one thing that makes you a better person.” Paying attention. Gratitude. Joy. If even for a moment, make space in the necessary for the essential.
 . 
Scott Owens is always on the lookout for the essential. His new manuscript, Elemental, expands and reinforces the search. Expect to encounter the essential and you will! Scott has written thousands of poems to ground himself in the seeking and yet he still finds joyful surprise in the daily happenings and encounters that make real meaning in life, if you allow them to. Perhaps it is because he is intentional and systematic in his noticing that he discovers joy all around him. This book includes a section on the seasons, a travelogue section especially exploring North Carolina, a final section of life’s lessons. I will use it as a field guide for the truly essential.
 . 
Oh, and trees. Scott really, really loves trees, both in their grand collective leafiness and in their individual personalities. He mentions that he grew up around pecan trees and learned something about hiding vulnerability from the way their shells hide the sweet kernel. I’d like to sit down with Scott and swap yarns about the pecans in Granddaddy’s back yard. Or my beloved beech I will not forsake even though it dropped a branch through my windshield. Or the hundred colors of lichen on the holly’s bark. Then we will move on to birds, and mountains, and the sound of moving water. We will discover how much we have in common. We will nod and share a slice of joy in the discovery that every single creature on earth holds that much in common and more. That joy, that knowledge, is truly essential.
 . 
❦
 . 
Keep your eyes peeled at Redhawk Publications for Scott Owens’s new book, Elemental, due out by this August, 2025.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
All That Is
 . 
It’s winter,
a hard time of year
for noticing things,
except the wide sky
through limbs of trees,
and the shapes of trees
stripped of leaves,
and a white-breasted nuthatch
hopping sideways
down the trunk
of a peeling paper birch,
and the omnipresent cold,
and the quiet
of everyone staying inside
as long as they possibly can,
but all that is not there,
in the haunted austerity
of a winter landscape,
is what makes it possible
to see all that is
 . 
Scott Owens
from Elemental, forthcoming in 2025 from Redhawk Press, Hickory NC; © Scott Owens.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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For the Unseen

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Julie Suk]
 . 
We’re Small on the Rim
 . 
of comprehension, but that shouldn’t distract
us from the fig tree
 . 
bent by fleshy globes on the verge of fall,
seed exposed where the fruit splits.
 . 
And there are the aunts
leaning over a cast-iron kettle filled
with sugar, spices, and a curl of lemon zest –
 . 
figs stewing, jars lined up, the ladle lifted
for a sample sip –
++++ never mind the times my lips were burned
++++ by a sweetness giving more than I gave back.
 . 
Hold out your hand for the unseen
my grandfather said.
 . 
There, the universe,
a potpourri of energy lit by colorful fires
that sparked me to life,
 . 
++++ accident though it was,
 . 
limb of the fig tree scratching the house,
on the table, a spoon.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I am crying for the beauty of these trees. An upwelling of emotion? A brain response slung through limbic system from temporal lobe because of certain inverted images on my retina? No, a watery reaction to pollen. Hazel catkins stirring in the breeze. An itch, a sneeze. But still I am crying for the beauty of these little trees.
 . 
How one says a thing is more important that what one says. We stop along the nature trail to notice this unequivocal manifestation of Spring – drooping yellow pollen catkins on American Hazelnut, full and fertile long before any leaves appear. These are the male flowers. Where are the female? Solitary at the tips of limbs and buds, discover a few spidery red florets no bigger than your little fingernail. From these tiny nubs the nuts will form and we can eat them in September if we beat the squirrels. As I point out the female flowers, how they point mostly outward and upward away from the catkins, I catch myself before blurting this explanation: “They’re designed to prevent self pollination.”
 . 
Designed? The Hazels worked out this arrangement of their own volition? Or had it planned for them de novo on some cosmic drawing board? Oh Evolution, how you embrace the random and non-linear, and how we struggle to grasp such a universe. I gulp and begin a different tack. “Self pollination increases the risk of recessive traits and may weaken the line. Over many, many generations, the Hazel trees that happen to grow with their little red flowers poised to catch pollen blown in from a neighbor tree are more likely to have strong offspring that can pass that trait along.”
 . 
And does that explain why I cry for the beauty of these trees? All these trees? The red maples are already dropping their polleniferous bundles as winged seeds unspool from female flowers. Stony hickory nuts are still discoverable beside the trail from last fall’s excellent mast season. The green furze we spy at the ridgeline’s crown is tuliptrees’ earliest budbreak. The trees speak their names in the space they fill. They give their promises almost silently but always sure. There seems no end to the means my own species can devise to make the world harsh, hateful, ugly. There is no end to the beauty of these trees. I cry.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Dream It Was
 . 
Gone, the apples left last night for the deer –
 . 
shadows lighter than the night they passed through,
rune-like hoof marks carving the frosted lawn.
 . 
Like a dream,
but touch is my familiar.
 . 
May you and I morph into other bodies that meet
once this one goes
 . 
on and on into the blue heights – old trails
like those deer use around the girth of a mountain.
 . 
And after breath evaporates
may the words left without a tongue
fall into the pool where we swam,
 . 
the cold waters rushing back warm.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hold out your heart for the unseen. When there are no longer lips, a mouth, to hold our words may they pool in the places we loved. May we meet again on the blue heights, on some new trail, on a very old trail. What voice would you choose in your next life? Listen for me, a song of wind thin in the high branches.
 . 
❦
 . 
What would the new day hold for us if each morning we were astonished to wake? Dogwood scratches the window as wind picks up. Throaty testosterone rumbles as the teenager across the street starts his pickup to head to school. What could urge me out of bed instead of surrendering to warmth and pulling the covers higher? But this is a new day, the vernal equinox in fact. I confess I have reached the time of life when I can see the days ticking on ahead of me are finite in number.
 . 
Turning each page in Julie Suk’s Astonished to Wake is a reminder that new days are in short supply. Perhaps this one will weave its meaning from days treasured in their remembering. Perhaps this one would prefer to eat me raw. Perhaps this is the day I really will wake up and notice every person that has made my life, and even tell them so. A good book of poetry compels one to turn each page, then the next. A great book of poetry compels one to set the book aside and enter the newness of this day.
 . 
❦
 . 
From Charlotte, NC, and former managing editor of Southern Poetry Review, Julie Suk has been a beacon in the world for poetry for decades. R. T. Smith writes, “The poetry of Julie Suk is at once deceptively spare and metaphorically rich, and the sensual mystery of her perfectly pitched and etched lines is haunting, elemental, and wild.” Her many awards include the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Astonished to Wake is Julie’s sixth collection, published by Jacar Press.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Music
 . 
When my father was young, he played the violin,
his mother, the rosewood Grand.
 . 
She also had a voice clear and sweet,
 . 
also had tuberculosis and died
when my father was thirteen.
 . 
He never played again, but loved music,
 . 
the Victrola making its rounds,
or the two of us listening to opera on the radio.
 . 
No noise allowed in the house when Rosa Ponselle sang.
 . 
In my next life I want the voice of a violin.
 . 
Tell me what you’d like played
and I’ll speak from the key of love and pain,
 . 
how the living are echoes of the past,
 . 
my grandmother staring into the darkness – as I do now,
thinking of those I must leave.
 . 
Talking into the night,
we’ll hold sorrow up close and let it weep.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 .Doughton Park Tree 2021-02-23 
 . 

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Widow Makers

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2025| 8 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Sandra Dreis]
 . 
The Vestibule
 . 
I fear the snake plant
crouching on the coffee table,
crackled celadon planter
a get-well gift for Grandma
Gertie from distant cousin Fay.
 . 
It arrived yesterday, cat-beast
with bulging eyes that will prowl
room to room while Grandma,
small and fragile in her big chair,
sleeps. Stark plant, no leaves,
only sharp swords unsheathed.
 . 
I stall. Linger in light, the sunny
vestibule my barrier island,
face pressed into lace curtains
stretched tight over glass double doors.
I’m six. Safe. Separate from the mainland
of scary things. Cancer.
 . 
My blond frizz catches elastic, necklace
strung last summer from odd seashells
as we hummed together in the kitchen.
How Grandma dipped the fountain pen’s
gold tip in a bottle of dark blue ink,
 . 
etching columns in a heavy ledger,
numbers and letter so curly and pretty,
scratch-scratch-blot-blot-blot,
her easy script clear as the crystal
doorknob I dare not turn.
 . 
Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
How safe is safe enough, and how safe too safe? Third day of backpacking, Mike and I arrive at a clearing and scout for a good tent site. Not too much slope, head higher than heels, no roots or stones, at least none too big. Ah, here it is, the perfect spot. Per our usual routine we lie down in the leaves to test the lay, and then Mike looks up. Nope. Thirty feet above our heads is a dead branch big around as your thigh. If that thing cracks free in a midnight gust, our wives will be cashing in the policies. Find a different site.
 . 
Fifteen years later Linda is still not a widow and I should be grateful that she seems to intend to keep it that way for a while yet. Last Thursday I was hoping to hike up the Mountains-to-Sea Trail for a work day above Stone Mountain State Park, but a front moved in and lashed the house all night. The morning forecast still warned of gusts up to 35 mph. Lots of dead branches in all those trees. Did I decide to stay home for me or for Linda?
 . 
Looking at the photos of my braver friends who did spend the day on the trail, I wish I’d gone with them. Yes, I do. Which regret is more bitter, doing the thing that gets you into a mess of trouble or not doing the thing that only might have? I suppose if a tree falls on you, your regret is swift and sharp but it isn’t going last very long (nor are you), whereas I’ve been moping for a week that I didn’t give those trees a chance to get me.
 . 
Which just proves . . . nothing. The tree that gets me will be the one I didn’t see coming. Rue and remorse and the road not taken are great for writing a poem but not particularly useful for getting out of bed each morning. I’ll stir up a tasty stew of the past and savor it when a good meal of recollection is called for, but I’ll do my best not to choke on it.
 . 
On the other hand, nothing is altogether sorry or useless if it reminds you occasionally to look up.
 . 
 .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Charles, Triple Pirouette – 1983
 . 
They share spartan diets, actor’s nightmares,
sore feet. Meet in a Hell’s Kitchen laundry room.
He’s drying, reading a Bible, waiting.
She’s washing a basket of dance clothes
and sweats. He hands her a needed quarter.
 . 
Turns out, she’s directing and casting
a twenty-city tour, so they chat away.
Excellent pay. He light ups, demonstrates
a triple pirouette in sneakers – on carpet.
His easy-going pizzazz, an instant hire.
 . 
Bright-eyed even for early morning rehearsals,
he’s warmed-up and ready. During breaks, a loner,
he reads the Bible. In hotel lobbies, on plane rides.
To sassy cast members, he winks, “I’ll pray for you.”
 . 
Performances end by Christmas, yet nobody hears
from Charles. The gossip train – Radio City nabbed him,
for sure. But his roommate calls her from St. Vincent’s.
Charles is gone. A rare pneumonia. Enough said.
 . 
Bath towels thud, dryer drum pounds. Her face flushes
pink as she opens to door to bereft. Puff of heat.
Steam dissipates, clothes churn and settle with a sigh.
Oh, Charles.
Bible in hand, he gently spins to a stop.
 . 
Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The three steps required to create a poetry book, perhaps in decreasing order of difficulty, are choosing which poems to include, deciding how to order and arrange them, and picking a title. None of the three are easy but creating a title is the most mysterious. Many poets cop out and just use the title of one of the poems in the collection – but how do you decide which one is THE poem? Someday soon I’m going to create a found poem using only the titles of the hundreds of poetry books lurking in every corner of my house. I think I’ll title it, “New and Selected.”
 . 
Cultured Pearls by Sandra Brodkin Dreis – where does that title come from and what is its deeper meaning? The only reference to pearls among the poetry is spotless white sandals, silky pearl-button cardigan in Kingdom of Immaculate, which lingers with the poet’s mother in her last days of dementia. A cultured pearl is a beautiful artifact, a human effort to replicate and even improve upon nature. It is a commonplace bit of shell formed by machining into a sphere but then over the course of a year or longer within the mantle of a living mollusk layered with exquisite nacre.
 . 
Perhaps every one of us is a cultured pearl. Throughout our lives we struggle to create the artifact of our persona, but our life itself creates the strange chemistry that makes us who we are. Inventory our insides and you get a fairly boring list: carbon, calcium, nitrogen, oxygen; sugar, protein, necklaces of nucleotide; bone, fat, gristle. But the sac which holds these elements and molecules and tissues, the mantle that continuously forms and reforms us, is wit, humor, curiosity, love.
 . 
These poems by Sandra Dreis are indeed such a nacreous mantle. So many pearls inhabit her lines – cherished friends lost to AIDS, family members scarred by prejudice and displacement, loved ones fading and dying. She holds their luster up to us. She reminds us how they have shone. She may admit the grit and schmutz that make up the heart of persons, but she also opens the shell and reveals each one’s unique beauty. So, Sandra . . . nice title!
 . 
❦
 . 
Cultured Pearls is available from Kelsay Books. Sandra Dreis lives in Winston-Salem and has had a long career as dancer, educator, novelist, and poet.
Read Raven’s Beak by Sandra at this previous intallment of VERSE & IMAGE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Early Grey
 . 
Mom does not remember
Earl Grey tea. That she prefers it.
That she loves it. No sugar. Just plain
No lemon. God forbid – milk.
 . 
For all she knows, Earl Grey is a fine gentleman
riding from his castle in the English countryside,
galloping on his well-groomed steed. He halts
by the rocky brook to adjust his fine felt hat.
 . 
Mom, at 93. My reminders, steady fuel,
stoke the furnace of her runaway locomotive.
But Mom, you love Earl Grey, your favorite!
Really? I do? Well, okay. If you say so.
 . 
Consider young Earl – Mom’s former sixth-grader
who threatened to kill himself. New York City
Police apprehended him on the 59th St. Bridge.
That Earl, she claims, took years off her life.
 . 
Perhaps Earl Grey – could he be an uncle?
A Jewish uncle named, Harry Grey, emigrated
as Harry Greenberg from a shtetl in Russia.
Maybe Ellis Island saw fit to shorten his name.
 . 
The copper kettle shrieks, Mom unaware.
I pour steaming tea and fill our porcelain cups
with disbelief. Small kitchen table. We sit before
a plate of scones. Mom smiles. We steep.
 . 
Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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