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Moving Day

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, family, I-70 Review, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Rebecca Baggett, Richard Widerkehr, Southern writing on October 18, 2024| 6 Comments »

[with 4 poems from I-70 Review]

Bears Active in This Area

++++ warning sign in my mountain cabin

This time, others have seen you,

treading circles on the gravel drive,

shouldering through grapevine tangles.

The possibility of you was always here,

in the night-mouth of the cave that gapes

below my porch, in dark boulders

hulking along the trail.

Your presence countermands silence –

I chatter and sing as I walk the open road,

snatches of carols, toddler songs –

and shy from the path that meanders

to a sunlit filed strewn with windfalls

from long-neglected trees. I imagine

you keeping pace, just out of sight,

your huffs mocking my jabber,

your heavy steps a counterpoint

as I scurry past thickets, scan uneasily

the curving trail ahead, intruder

in a world that was never mine,

though you are the first to insist

that I acknowledge it.

Rebecca Baggett

from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024

❦ ❦ ❦

What would a toddler remember about moving away? The apartment in Niagara Falls is a dream of stairwells and windows and darkness outside; the new house in the new subdivision with no grass at all is a neighbor’s dog named Bishy. Or was Bishy the neighbor’s toddler I played with?

I am four when we move away again, from New York to Tennessee, and I remember plenty about Marion Road: Bob and I watching Little Rascals until Mom declares, “You’re going to turn into rascals!”; our little sun room Aunt Ellen fitted up as a bed-sit while she attended Memphis State, and we kids hiding giggling under her covers until she came home each afternoon; the neighbor boy who introduced us to the word butt and we thought we were the first humans ever to utter something so outrageous. Memories of the neighborhood, yes, but memories of moving there? Packing and unpacking? Worrying that Puppy would get lost in the shuffle or that somehow Mom wouldn’t be there when we arrived? None of that remains.

Our family makes one more inconsequential move just blocks away when I am six, but then when I’m twelve the Big Away arrives. Up until this what a tranquil 1950’s childhood: I walk to Colonial Elementary every morning with my friends and play with the same friends every evening until the streetlights come on. Serene. Now I’m midway through sixth grade, still coasting, when the bomb drops. Did I protest when Dad announced in January we were leaving Memphis to move to Delaware? Maybe, I don’t recall; that memory is muddy, but this one is sharp as crystal – I walk into class in my new school and my new classmates all turn to look. My clothes aren’t right, my accent is a joke (literally – within about sixty seconds I will have the nickname “Memphis,” which sticks), and I have a different teacher for every subject. And then in just six more months we will move to Michigan. Just over a year beyond that, two months into eighth grade, we move to Ohio.

So, my friend, is it any wonder that some sixty years later I have trouble remembering your name until the fourth or fifth time we meet? That as we converse in a group you notice me smiling and nodding and slowly drifting off into space? That I would rather write this blog into the wee hours than drop by your house for coffee? I want to be a good friend to you, and in fact I like you and this hug from me to you is real, but ah, it’s risky. There’s always that possibility, without warning and with no desire on my part, that someday soon I might be moving away.

❦

It never occurred to me to wonder how Dad felt about all those moves. The moving was his fault, after all, necessary for his promotions and advancement with DuPont, for whom he worked all his life. I can scarcely imagine the million details he had to sift through to put his family into boxes and take them out again hundreds of miles away. I’m not surprised that as I clean out his house I find drawers full of lists on yellow pads, on the backs of junk mail, on bills and receipts. Half the time when he calls me, it’s to add something to the shopping list. And then there are still those boxes in the attic labeled Allied Van Lines.

But what about the rest of us? Did Dad wake sweating in the middle of the night worrying how moving away would affect his family? Just one time he blinked: after I was married and gone but Mary Ellen was still at home, a junior in high school, Dad turned down a promotion so she could graduate with her class. A sacrifice that stalled his career for a decade.

Tomorrow is Dad’s last moving day. Since Mom died in July, Dad has agreed to move closer to us. For a week I’ve ferried boxes and duffels, checked off my lists and then made new ones, and tomorrow after lunch I’ll drive Dad to a nursing center just two miles from our house. He says he’s willing to move as long as the food is good (it is). We’ve hung portraits of the grandkids, pastels by Mom. His Duke pillow is on the recliner and his new Duke banner hangs on the door of room 507 to welcome him. God knows I’ve been waking in the middle of the night sweating the million details. Let us hope that after 98 years of moving, Dad will discover in this new and final home a place to rest.

❦ ❦ ❦

Porta Nigra *

++++ Trier, Germany

The breath of sun and rain

only darkens on my face.

The cat-claws of millennia,

the graffiti of tourists,

fade into my walls.

I, who guarded this city so long,

sit truncated now.

My frieze the sweaty flesh

of lovers on cool bare stones.

Catch me in another thousand years,

your eyes as hard and dark as mine.

See if these holes will match

the mysteries of death

and flesh on blackened stone.

Bradley Strahan

from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024

* a gate in the remaining piece of Trier’s old Roman wall

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The 2024 issue of I-70 Review arrived in last week’s post. Besides many wonderful voices new to me, I discovered within its pages several old friends who’ve agreed to let me reprint their poems.

I-70 Review, Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond is based in Kansas, USA, but publishes poetry, short fiction, and art from around the world. They also sponsor the annual Bill Hickok Humor award for poetry.

Submission guidelines HERE

Purchase a copy HERE

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Messenger in Early November

++++++ – in memory of Jay Klokker

Driving past Agate Bay, I catch a glimpse

of this deer in a splotch of sun and shadow –

the brown-tail’s flanks on the edge of the road

in yellow leaves, thin branches. Las May

after your death, a bear cub loped beside my car

like a lost Labrador, seemed to disappear

under my front bumper. Slamming on the brakes,

I felt no thud, heard nothing. Amazing, the cub

as if uninjured, clambered up the ditch-bank.

Only later, after your memorial, did I reread

your last poems, that black bear nosing

at your sleeping bag in the camp site

in Arizona; recalled marmots whistling

in the pillow basalt near Mt. Baker; the grouse

thumping its tail near our driveway,

feasting on red hawthorn berries.

You noticed. I cannot believe you said no

to another go-round on the cancer wish machine,

you called it, completed your book First Stars.

On you last hike, you raced downhill

in your wheelchair, shouting. You must

be in these sun spots, mottled shadows.

Too excellent a camouflage, my friend –

thin, flickering branches, a few gold leaves,

before all the color goes away.

Richard Widerkehr

from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024

this poem will appear in Richard’s new book, Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Press)

❦ ❦ ❦

The Other

Last night coyotes laughed

at the neighbor’s bulked-up lab restrained

behind his chain-link, his fearful bark,

their yips of liberty and mild derision;

are coyotes such demons, or just particular

about whom they allow to know them?

Or are they perhaps spirits of the other,

avatar of all we hominids in our marrow

know to fear? How to live beside that feeling?

Afraid of attack I stab; afraid of pain I cause it.

In the woods before daylight willingly lost,

soft tread, a twist in the trail then face to face –

perhaps she and I look into each other’s eyes

for two seconds, perhaps the rest

of my life; coyote impassive,

considerate, measures our distance,

our closeness, then softly pivots

and pads away, prudent, fearless,

willing to allow the two of us

to share the universe.

Bill Griffin

from I-70 Review, Eighteenth Edition, 2024

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Chimney Swifts

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, Heron Clan, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Preston Martin, Priscilla Webster-Williams, Southern writing on July 28, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with poems from Heron Clan X]

Chimney Swifts at the Historic Carolina Coach Garage

Two now more arrive and flit into the swirl,

swelling hive mind they shift and shape

the wind, counter then clockwise whirl

above old brickwork’s beckoning gape

left standing here erect as testament,

our conservational intent to leave

some landmark urban respite, benevolent

perhaps, perhaps self-serving; we’ve

taken advantage of their propulsive drive,

pushed our chairs back from the table

in the court to lean & steal their lives

and freedom open mouthed, rapt, able

for these few moments until darkness falls

to rise with them, untethered, bold

venture to where the elemental almost calls

but too soon bedtime, now our supper’s cold.

[For decades this warehouse and shop in Raleigh, North Carolina was a hub of activity servicing Carolina Coach Company buses, in the 1940s the nation’s largest regional bus company.]

Bill Griffin

❦ ❦ ❦

Mom can no longer hear their restless chitterings up the flue on summer evenings. When we sit on the front porch she doesn’t notice their atmospheric ellipsis, punctuating summer afternoons with their aerobatics. She can’t believe they’re calling constantly to each other and to us until I try to mimic that chatter and she laughs. What she most definitely can, though, is wish to see them diving into her chimney at dusk, especially when I tell her I’d seen one do just that last night.

Revered ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson described Chimney Swifts as little dark cigars with wings. Tapered on the head end and the tail end with sharply tapered wings jutting out mid-fuselage, fluttering so rapidly you’d swear those wingbeats were uncoordinated and asynchronous, well, yes they do look like airborne cigars. Although they often appear in field guide pages adjacent to those other famous aerial foragers, the Swallows, taxonomists place Swifts most closely related to Hummingbirds (based on wing structure). No hovering, though, for these Chimney Swifts – always forward, forward, forward with their loops and barrel rolls. Some species of Swift only alight to lay eggs, spending all the rest of their lives in the air.

Once you recognize a Chimney Swift’s fricative titter, you’ll realize they’ve accompanied you on hot afternoons and evenings all your life (assuming you live in the Eastern US). Although they winter in Peru, all summer long from the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast Chimney Swifts are widespread and common, probably more common today than they were pre-colonization, when they depended on hollow trees for breeding. These days they sometimes nest by the hundreds in abandoned chimneys, great clouds spiraling in at dusk, perhaps mistaken for bats. You can even buy chimney-like roosting boxes to attract them to your yard to eat the mosquitos.

After supper, I carry our chairs to the deck for a clean line of sight to the chimney. No smoke has risen from these three pots for decades. Mom and I watch. And watch. The birds circle and tantalize, gyre away, spiral out of earshot then back again so swiftly she misses their brief passage. Keep looking. Don’t blink. Two Swifts buzz the opening but then pull up in a high-G climb. Sky darkens. Dusk wants to coalesce around us, trundle us back indoors. Suddenly one little bird at full throttle blips straight down into the chimney. Then another. It’s become too dark to count the rest, but when we return to the couch beside the fireplace we hear the nestling together of a congenial company who’ll rest here with us until first light.

❦

Doug Stuber, Ed Lyons, and Richard Smyth Ph.D. hatched the idea for Poems from the Heron Clan in Rochester, New York in 1998. After Doug returned in 2015 from a seven-year professorship in South Korea, the anthology has been published every year. Not only does Volume Ten encompass a wide geography – poets from five continents, poets from Turkey, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Montenegro, and a dozen other countries – it also embraces a lavish geography of style and theme. The editors explicitly state: “We aim to represent well-established poets and emerging writers, young and mature poets, and poets of color.”

And North Carolina. NC poets populate these pages abundantly. JS Absher, Glenn Cassidy, Earl Huband, Shelby Stephenson, Steve Cushman, Anna Dallara, the three founders themselves – if you live in the South and read poetry, you’ll recognize these voices accompanying you all summer, all seasons. I’m drawn to all of the Carolina poetry in this volume and tempted to sample each one in this post. Alas, perhaps you’ll just have to purchase a copy. Meanwhile, here are Priscilla Webster-Williams, Preston Martin, and Bradley Strahan from Heron Clan X.

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Morton Salt

Under a purple umbrella, a girl in a yellow raincoat

carries a box of salt, the cover art singing out

When It Rains It Pours. I studied the dark blue carton

that lived on the kitchen table, the Morton Salt Girl

smiling with each shake of the cylinder.

Morton, my father, toured with the big bands,

playing what he called Mickey Mouse Music,

tunes too tame for one who’d grown up crating

spicy Chicago jazz with Red Nichols and Jimmy Dorsey.

Morton met Jean, my mom-to-be, at the Nicollet,

where she was hostess of the grand dining room:

Grant Wood murals, double white linens,

real silver silverware, and a stage

for the musicians and the act.

Morton must have winked at Jean

from behind his golden trombone,

the vocalist crooning I’ll be seeing you

in all the old familiar places.

He must have whispered some kind of proposal

as they floated like movie stars across the dance floor.

When I was six, Mother shredded my Father’s photo,

set her stoic Midwestern jaw, and never spoke

of him again. She didn’t need to, his features etched

on my face like the grooves in one of his Bluebird records,

the same strawberry-blond hair appearing in my mirror.

Each day, I gazed at his name on that dark blue box

stamped with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,

and over time, Morton, my founding father,

became a pillar of salt.

Priscilla Webster-Williams

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Elegy, Gloria Died in Eden

She took the well-traveled road

two nights ago.

No more tractoring up the back hills

or brush cutting lower fields,

or using her Daddy’s walking stick

++++ down beside the creek –

or oiling the mower or

penciling in the Reds box score,

or sipping an evening sweet wine

on the porch

++++ as nightly geese call down,

close overhead, descending to the reservoir.

She noted in her diary the day the flew on south.

And who will shoot the coyotes now?

Preston Martin

❦ ❦ ❦

Empty Places

In the end we are all archaeologists,

sifting through the ruins of existence

to find shards of pottery

inscribed in a strange tongue:

a letter from a friend left on a picnic table

a poem written on the back of a menu,

the sketch of a girl whose name you can‘t recall,

a yellowed photograph with stranger’s eyes.

We keep on struggling with left over pieces

from a childhood puzzle, trying to fill the gaps

left my smiling lips missing from a face,

tears frozen on eyeless cheeks,

fingers absent from an outstretched hand.

But somehow cannot fill the empty place

and the dark comes creeping in.

originally published in Gargoyle

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The editors of Poems from the Heron Clan invite you to buy a copy, explore their previous issues at their BLOG, and consider submitting three poems and a 50-word bio to:

katherinejamesbooks@gmail.com

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A Parting Glass

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged A Parting Glass, Bill Griffin, Bradley Strahan, BrickHouse Books, imagery, New Year's Eve, poetry on December 30, 2022| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Brad Strahan]

Though faces fade as years fly past
I raise to you this parting glass.

What shall we keep when the house has shed its bustle and the clock makes known its ticking from the next room? Bright paper discarded, plates stacked, car doors slammed as farewells spiral out into the cold, biting, stark? What shall we keep when not presents but this present settles itself again into the chair beside us, all its remarks past uttering?

My hands in the suds, Linda passes me crockery and remarks, “I wonder what the next year will be like.” “Different from this one,” I say without thinking, but then I start the tally. What gloom do I hope will not be repeated and how shall I number the gathering portents that threaten? Whoa, there. Why does it slip in so easily, no effort at all, this brooding on past troubles and fretting about some foreboding future yet unseen?

Share in the closing refrain from the Irish folk song, “The Parting Glass”:

But since it has so ought to be
By a time to rise and a time to fall
Come fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all!

I have no resolutions; so little of this past year seems resolved. I have responsibilities and unfulfilled tasks and hovering demons aplenty, but let us pause a moment in this rare quietude to let the little mice of joy creep in from the corners. A young girl’s laughter, a little boy’s raised eyebrows, an afternoon walk with a teenager grown suddenly voluble, a recollection shared with a beloved companion – there is time enough to fall, time enough to mourn, but time as well for a smile if we but make it so. What we keep and what we carry – may they rest light upon our shoulders tomorrow.

❦ ❦ ❦

What Shall We Keep?
(a moment in Ireland, where the world ends)

And the answer that comes back
is the wind off the Irish sea.
Not to be, not to see,
beyond understanding.

This damaged flesh we hold,
a fortress against nothing,
like the ruined Viking towers;
exclamations left
after the words are erased.

Should we care what wind blows
our dust into tomorrow?
Could we feel the rain
that washes clean the green face
of this unsceptred isle?

Would we matter when
even our names are washed
clean as the stones in those
abandoned churchyards?

Somehow, blessed between green
and gray; sometime, bound between
the blaze of Fall and white Winter
I have loved you and maybe
that is answer enough.

❦ ❦ ❦

“A remembrance of Ireland” is how Brad Strahan describes A Parting Glass, his collection inspired by a year in Mallow, County Cork. His wife Shirley had “filled the long-vacant post of organist” and in addition to the congregation of St. James, Church of Ireland, they were welcomed into the community of poets. These fourteen poems are themselves a spare congregation, the lines spare, reverent, musing, and infused with the philosophy of rain-washed green island and mossed stones in ancient churchyards.

Fitting and more than fitting are these poems for the final few days of another roiling storm-tossed year. These are the days when we plant our feet and hope to feel what anchors us to the turf before the next year launches forth, uncertain, yes, but bright and hopeful for what it may discover. This is the reckoning, the nod of acquiescence when my grandson calls out to me, “Old man!”, the acceptance that a new year is no newer than any day which begins with taking another breath.

Read these poems in the warm companionship of ghosts that welcome your presence. Read and find company with the distant traveler and the warm hearth. With days of green and gray passed, passing, yet to pass. Raise your glass, all of us raise our glasses to the joy that may find each one.

❦ ❦ ❦

Hymn

Winter, solid to the bone,
melts in the music.
Colored light pearls
the faces in the wooden pews.

The news, good or bad,
has no foothold here.
The cold rain and snow
vanish in a flame of song.

Here we robe our tarnish
in vestments of harmony:
snow crystal bells
and a storm of organ-sound.

Here we are, not what we are
but what we would be,
notes on a purer staff,
leaning hard from brass to gold.

❦ ❦ ❦

A Book of Common Prayer
(St. James Church, Mallow)

Let me not for the flowers
by the altar placed.

Let me not for the windows
that gleam with grace.

Let me not for the music,
simple voices raised.

Let me still recall
the goodness that amazed

though nothing follows
being in this state of grace:

no more smiles, no more roses
and none there to embrace.

❦ ❦ ❦

NOTE: if you would like to purchase a copy of A Parting Glass from Bradley Strahan, please comment on this post or email me at comments@griffinpoetry.com.
++++++++++++++++++++++ Thanks! — Bill