Meadowbeauty, Rhexia virginica
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[ 3 poems by Linda Parsons ]
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The Vale
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I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall
be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
— John 10:9
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To brave the vale, to spread its curtain,
like my father on the hillock of his final pass,
our common purgatory. My father, who fingers
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my knuckles with one hand, counts the abacus
of my backbone with the other. We’re in a waiting
period, he says is if to apparitions come
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for the main event, time is winding down.
Nothing in my own life matters, not that I share
his descent on shards of marriage vows,
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that I roam the sheepfold in search of oasis.
Only that the weather is good or overcast,
lunch is coming or done. We sit skin to skin,
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as never before, his hands the picture of his mother’s.
Maybe she’s the one in white organdy, her hair
still strawberry blond, tapping her ladies’ Bulova:
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Lordy, how the time goes. Maybe she’s the shepherd
disguised, the one who lies down at the mouth
of thievery, both door and gatekeeper for the huddled
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bleating. Let us enter the door without pleading
or birthright and be known by the one, the voice
leading us in and out to find pasture,
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fingers woven at our breast so weary from being
and trying, so strayed we can only be gathered.
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Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Phantom
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Strange the great presence in absence—
book I remembered on the second shelf
of the red bookcase, next to Flannery
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and Ole Fred, rounding the corner to bare
wall, or brushing my left hand, indentation
on the ring finger from years of gold.
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The mind plays tricks, clasps the gilt frame
if imagined life even after the moving truck
with his furniture barrels off, even after
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I sit shiva with my grief, days unraveled
partly by my own device, and I have, thread
by knotty thread, woven a new silken skin.
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Ghost pain, phantom pain, a limb lopped
clean, the dead bee’s sting. We are good
amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards,
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regenerating feet and tails in the shadows
where no one watches us spin and weep,
where no one sees me turn a corner
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in the dark before bed, giving wide berth,
my body’s radar still beeping and flashing
to sidestep a bookcase no longer there.
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Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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Ironweed and crab spider
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Inner Work
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for Paula Capps Kyser
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The inner work must be done in the well
of drawer among pebbled buttons kept
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for whenever, lavender sachets spilling
their guts, Grandmama’s cat’s-eye glasses,
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my pride pierced on her pincushion.
Only there can I sift what hangs loose
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on my shoulders, the stained, the torn,
crocheted illusories never seeing
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light of day. Keys to nowhere, Irish
pence, the pocket Psalms and Proverbs
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have no providence, no commerce
in my wilderness, though I rub each
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faux pearl as talisman, the Long Nights Moon
heartsick at my window. Strayed, undone
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in the layers, I dig to the bottom, wooden
thud that nips my heel, turns me to the field
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of what never emptied in the first place,
not bargain or plea but steppingstones,
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uneaten breadcrumbs, one then another.
Buckeye and amethyst still harbor luck.
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Old stockings will do for garden stakes,
for spring coming sure.
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Linda Parsons
from Candescent, Iris Press, Oak Ridge TN; © 2019
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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what never emptied in the first place . . . spring coming sure.
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What we truly lose – is it possible that is something different from what we think we’ve lost? The love of so many years now parted, disdaining; the beloved parent now departed, buried. Who wouldn’t be shattered to pieces? Who wouldn’t doubt in any power to restore?
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Linda Parson’s poems do not skip lightly across the landscape of grief. She stabs her fingers into the cold clay and wrestles with the spiky roots. Stiffened and wearied along with her, we ourselves wonder if there is any hope that warmth may return. Loss is not defeated but confirmed, in all its guises of loneliness and disruption. But we also accompany the poet into her intentional silence. She will release the past from strangling her present, from projecting her future. Perhaps what she thinks she has lost does threaten her with the loss of hope, the loss of joy. With the loss of the inner knowledge that spring comes sure. But then she turns to the field of what never emptied in the first place, and there she finds a way back. A path. Steppingstones. She is not truly lost.
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Candescent is a glowing meadow with all its messy diversity of creatures and themes. Vines and briers may twine and choke, but full fecund life grows strong through the past into the present. Life will not be overcome. This collection of poems, colorful and fragrant, affirms the resilience of the human spirit. Struggle and pain are part of us but do not make us. I take encouragement from the poet’s words: Let dead be dead . . . return, to cress beneath your feet, return to real and true.
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Boneset and Swallowtail
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Linda Parsons is a member of the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame and has served as the Poet Laureate of Knoxville. She will be poetry instructor at the 2026 Tremont Writers Conference in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her bio at The Poetry Foundation is available HERE; her fifth poetry collection, Candescent, is available from IRIS PRESS.
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– Bill
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thanks, Sarah! Do you have other favorite poems by Linda? ---B