David Radavich | V E R S E and I M A G E

Posts Tagged ‘David Radavich’

Monsters

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Cervena Barva Press, David Radavich, family, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on January 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

[with 3 poems by David Radavich]

Offering

From one day

to the next

seems a difference

between drought

and flood,

corporations

and the poor.

Should we pack

our suitcase

for the future?

We bend over

gardenias

in the back yard,

salvia, rosemary,

daylilies jut now

blazing

wondering if nature

can withstand

our age,

sun fighting

with wind and rain,

wars consuming

everything

we believe.

Time to visit

the cemetery, bring

the pure lilies

we picked

this morning

as our offering

to the dead,

We owe them

our knees

and this stab at

continuing

paying homage

to names

and all

that’s green.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

“These are monsters migrating.” Thus the boy explains the drawing he’s brought home from kindergarten. Three big ones fly south, dragon-winged, pterodactylloid, gallinaceous. A mighty bruiser gallops on great feet bound to raise dust and thunder, heavy tail thrashing. But here’s one down in the corner foreground, not imposing, non-scary, looking me straight in the eye. Most monsters speed away, thank goodness, but some are willing to stay and make friends.

Monsters sneak into my head at 3 AM when I return from the bathroom. In the old days, before I retired from medicine, they called me from the ICU or Labor & Delivery and I knew it was time to pull up my pants and find the car keys. Now they spring up when I call them – damn! – and poke me with their spines and cold stiff claws each time my breath attempts to settle. Does anyone escape? Doesn’t everyone with parent, child, grandchild harbor a squirm of worry underneath the bed, ready to pop awake and crawl up between the sheets?

Monsters seem to be drawn to the idle mind like migrating bats to open, dark caverns. Their scales and markings may vary but they all belong to Class, Order, and Family of What If? Once their migration might have lasted just hours – what if I can’t get his blood pressure up? what if her baby’s head is transverse? – but now they don’t seem to have any finite lifespan. The infinite multiverse fans out from its monstrous 3 AM nidus into a crashing storm of uncertainty. Calm yourself. Smooth those waves of rapid breathing. Wrap the turbulence and darkness until they become a comforting cloak. What . . .

. . . if you sit down with me here and tell me about these monsters? The boy has a name for each one. He knows their powers and their weaknesses. Far from being fearful, these are friends, some to each other and all of them to him. You wouldn’t want to sit on one – they’re sharp, and they might break! – but it’s amazing to watch them fly and run. In fact, they are all related to each other. They are monster family.

❦ ❦ ❦

Crux

for Shelby

This is where

boy meets man:

a space

always alone

between

water and land,

fishing

or hiking,

gathering crayfish,

skipping stones,

another boss

is another tyrant,

pay not enough

to make ends meet,

mouths to feed

at the table,

gills in the water

needing your lure

and just the right

throw to home

sliding in

or head-long,

swinging high over

that creek

never knowing

if the vine will hold,

that’s what being

adult means:

learning

not to trust,

pulling everything

you’ve got,

keeping a sharp eye on

what’s moving

and then

grab it for grace,

feed that family

and don’t apologize.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

What if my name, instead of “Bill,” were “Boy?” What is the thing against the idea of the thing? And words on a page, are they the one or are they the other? David Radavich, in Here’s Plenty, doesn’t open his palm and hold out to you the answer to such queries, but he leaves plenty of answers scattered among the lilies or still hanging from branches, reddening fruit for us readers to discover. Can the idea of a thing become itself when we bite into it, when we take it into ourselves?

This is one task and one blessing of poetry – not to be a textbook, lining out chapter and verse; not to be gospel; but to be spell, cast into the world and opening like the petalled layers of a peony. Perhaps we return day by day to discover its transformation, perhaps we grab and thrust our nose deep into the blossom’s perfume and scatter petals all around us. Either way we engage, yes with the words but even more so with ourselves. The real poetry is what we write within while reading what is without.

David Radavich lives in the world. So apples, seed and stem, peel and core and crisp. Edens and crags. Harsh sharp divisions and tender comings together. Nothing ignored or unnoticed, nothing left out. Everything invited in. You and me, too. Come – there’s plenty.

❦

Here’s Plenty is David Radavich’s tenth collection of poetry. He has also published many plays as well as scholarly and informal essays in many countries. The book is available HERE

❦ ❦ ❦

Going Home

Forget about it.

The old one wasn’t

worth much

anyway.

You can do better

tossing a coin

or consulting

some astrologer.

Choose

where or what

you want to be

and go there

to take your place

among the yet

to arrive.

Wave your white

flag to the past

and make your new

garden bloom

as if

you had been

there all along

incognito

among many

creatures

you don’t know

names for,

your enemies

forgotten

and a sky

just as much

your own

as a new skin.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

Read Full Post »

Language?

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Canonicals, David Radavich, Finishing Line Press, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 13, 2023| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by David Radavich]

Turtle

Its stomach brushes ground

as by long acquaintance,

one foot then another, one leaf,

slow digestion, eyes alert

like high-beams

in the wind-swept night,

hard against the air yet telling

stories as a stained-glass

window, victory

over hastening death,

comrade of dust and mud

and golden squares like armor

glinting whenever sun

arcs its sacrifice –

just so I think of you

unfolding a yellowed piece

of paper, words

you never meant to say

crawling their careful

way into my bone-frame,

softer than

the moon starting

to curl

into dawn

David Radavich

from Canonicals – Love’s Hours

❦ ❦ ❦

At 17 she had a boyfriend (briefly) whose language she did not speak. The two would sit at the back of the bus through the turns and hesitations of the clamorous diesel-fumed city and communicate with their lips, although words are not what passed between them. When they came up for breath it was no use to tell him about the menacing gothic facade they were passing or comment on the uniformed school children being led across the bridge. He would stare at her and she back at him until they reached her stop. Come inside? What am I saying, and what do you think I mean? Well, Tschuβ until tomorrow after school.

Some would say that no boy and girl at 17 ever speak the same language. Some say man and woman never at any age. Cynics. Nevertheless, when the girl’s best friend, who commanded some phrases the boy could grasp, had to call him one evening to convey a final message from the girl – angry? sad? frustrated? – and cancel any further bus rides, she still could never quite understand how it all had gone so wrong. An inter-language dictionary proved no help at all. Decades later she would still wake at 3 AM and feel the fool, although a few latent hippocampal neurons, hers and no doubt his as well, continued to fire, “What if? What if?” One tattered shred of recollection with lint of vocabulary she could have pieced together if she had tried still labored to remind her of this: when they had turned toward each other and he placed his hand at her neck, fingers in her soft short hair, they had seemed to understand each other well enough.

❦

Time is both a bewildering tangle and a firm reassurance in these poems by David Radavich from Canonicals – Love’s Hours. It is a book of hours – matins to vespers – but also a book of days and years. The images can be elusive, like moonlight through restless leaves, yet remain rich in their enticement. And what message does this subtle, earthbound, exalted language, this language both precise and intangible, what does it desire to convey? The object, the “you,” is it a focus for affection and gratitude or a saving grace always just beyond reach? Each word lovingly selected, placed, ordered: these poems understand you, the reader, and they invite you with all hopefulness and promise to understand them.

❦ ❦ ❦

Argus

Quietly, quietly

dawn takes its place

among the world’s

elements –

There will be rapes today,

and military coups,

also gay

birthdays, painful

dyings and forlorn lovers

discovering their first infatuation

with another body.

Let me be there for it all,

all seasons, all temperaments

seeing

the round circus

black and gold as autumn

spinning into night

love turning

a corner

into open doors

that lead to bright air

blowing

many leaves

David Radavich

from Canonicals – Love’s Hours

❦ ❦ ❦

Cyclical

To rediscover.

To find again what

has been lost

for more than thirty years.

A stolen ring

on someone else’s

hand, gold around a gun

or maybe you

clutching my heart

like a bandit.

In any case

it reappears, this missing

self, this jewel tossed

in some closet,

the world turns

so that China ends up

and we are land

at the sphere’s bottom

rediscovering what

has been lost by many others

and found again like

sunrise,

like buds breaking.

David Radavich

from Canonicals – Love’s Hours

❦ ❦ ❦

Read Full Post »

Earth Day – Rewild

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Barbara Bloom, Bill Griffin, David Radavich, Diane Seuss, Earth Day, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Jennifer Atkinson, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on April 22, 2023| 10 Comments »

[with poems by Jennifer Atkinson, David Radavich,
Barbara Bloom, Diane Seuss]

Today is Earth Day, April 22. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow we are publishing posts for Earth Day featuring poems submitted by our readers that touch the theme, Wild & Rewild.

Rewilding is a conservation effort aimed at restoring habitat, revitalizing ecosystems, and reintroducing animals and plants that historically occupied these wild spaces.
Rewilding may be as small as converting cow pasture to a bit of riparian Piedmont Prairie along the Mitchell River in Surry County, NC.
It may be as large as creating wildlife corridors down the chain of the Rockies for migrating pronghorns.
It may be as simple as replacing introduced invasives in your yard with native species; as complex as legislation to set aside vast tracts as wilderness.

How does the poet encounter and respond to wildness? A native wildflower struggling in an urban park? A remote mountaintop far from human presence? A wild voice speaking to the heart; wild urges propelling the soul into the unknown?

A wild call from the past, the present, into the future?
For Earth Day 2023, touch the wild. Rewild yourself.

❦

Thank you to the readers of these pages
who have responded to my call for poems this Earth Day.
Watch for new posts on April 21, April 22, and April 23.

All photographs were taken April 11-17, 2023,
along the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail,
part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in North Carolina, USA.

Earth Day 2023 art by Linda French Griffin.

❦ ❦ ❦

Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River

Oat stalks hang their oat-heavy heads.
Panic grass shakes in the wind
off a goldfinch’s wing. Cause,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ effect, and cause.

Drone, like the bee, of goldenrod and aster,
tool of the stick-tight and cockleburr,
I park and wade into high riverside grasses.

A dog gnaws on a box turtle, a spider rides
a floating log, straining the air of its midges and leafbits.
A fisherman lazy as late summer current,
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ casts, reels, and casts.

It occurs to me I am alive, which is to say
I won’t be soon. Robinson Jeffers
from Carmel Point, in “an unbroken field of poppy and lupin”

ashamed of us all (of himself ), took solace in time,
in salt, water, and rock, in knowing
all things human “will ebb, and all/
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ Their works dissolve.”

Me, too. And I’m not always so patient. I’ve caught myself
wishing our spoiler species gone, just swept away,
returned to rust and compost for more deserving earthly forms.

Meanwhile, flint arrowheads turn up among the plastic
picnic sporks, the glacial crags and bottom silt.
Hawks roost across the river on the now defunct
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ nuclear power plant cooling tower,

flotsam left at the human high water mark.
Like mussel shells, like driftwood or seedpod,
like the current’s corrugations in the sand.

Here, on this side, a woodchuck sits up, lustrous,
fat on her chestnut haunches, (she thinks herself
queen of her narrow realm) and munches
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ the fisherman’s crust.

Who wouldn’t smile? Who doesn’t pity—and love—
the woodchuck not only despite but for her like-human smugness?
How can I not through her intercession forgive
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ for now a few things human.

Jennifer Atkinson
Selected by Bill Griffin; from the book THE THINKING EYE, Parlor Press
Appeared online at Poem-a-Day, Poems.com, on March 13, 2023

Jennifer Atkinson’s comments: “But how do we live with our knowledge and the emotional cloud of fear, guilt, anger, grief, and helplessness, a cloud that surrounds us, each of us alone, and all of us together? That cloud has become intrinsic to my ecopoetical work. Burdened with the beauty and loss and malicious awfulness ahead, weighted with the anxiety that hits whenever a winter day dawns without frost on the ground or another ‘unprecedented’ downpour rings in the gutter, how do I live?”

Who wouldn’t despair? Who wouldn’t smile? The daily slog through politics and pollution is too heavy to be borne. The daily green that lights my kitchen window while I make coffee is too beautiful to bear. This poem drives me into the inescapable reality of damaged Earth but also offers a leafy twig of hope.

– Bill Griffin / Elkin, North Carolina

[and I couldn’t resist that title after all the Robinson Jeffers I’ve been reading this past year.]

❦ ❦ ❦

Back Woods

Only in the hills behind
comes solace,

winter white against
the brown verticality of reaching

bare as need,
a few lingering green

hold-outs
crying for mercy,

leaves curled
atop themselves quiet

as abandoned
lovers.

I have already
sided with the deep creviced

ravine and its snow
cheeks incised

with cares in shadow

under a sun that
promises

open sky
open hearts.

David Radavich
first published in Blueline in 2008

This poem is marked by jagged line lengths and abrupt stanza breaks that emphasize the rawness and otherness of the natural world. The speaker feels attracted to the sharp contrasts in color and juxtaposition of “creviced ravine” with the softer “snow cheeks,” but s/he is nonetheless distant from it and can only admire the scene from afar with a kind of wishful, empathetic watching.

– David Radavich / Charlotte, North Carolina

❦ ❦ ❦

Night Swim: Phosphorescence

We’d run down the path to the dock,
our feet knowing the rocks, never stumbling,
never falling, and we’d jump right in,
the ocean calm under the summer stars,
and swim out a little ways,
lifting our hands out of the water
to watch the drops linger and fall from our fingers,
like pearls, like diamonds, and kick our legs hard
for the trail of bright silver we’d leave behind-
and finally climb out, trembling with the chill,
sorry to wipe those jewels from our bodies.

Barbara Bloom
originally published in Pulling Down the Heavens (Hummingbird Press, 2017).

I grew up on a remote coastal homestead in British Columbia, Canada. Living in such a wild and demanding place has shaped the way I see the world. The poem demonstrates how as children we were amazed by the natural world around us, but saw no separation: it was ours to be experienced. I now live in Bellingham, Washington, not too far from where I lived as a child, and surrounded by much of the same beauty and wildness. I count myself lucky for that!

– Barbara Bloom / Bellingham, Washington

❦ ❦ ❦

Young Hare

Oh my love, Albrecht Dürer, your hare
is not a spectacle, it is not an exploding hare,
it is not a projection of the young hare
within you, the gentleness in you, or a disassembled hare,
nor a subliminal or concealed hare,
nor is it the imagination as hare

nor the soul as a long-eared, soft-eared hare,
Dürer, you painted this hare,
some say you killed a field hare
and brought it into your studio, or bagged a live hare
and caged it so you could look hard at a wild hare
without it running off into thorn bushes as hares

will do, and you sketched the hare
and laid down a watercolor wash over the hare
and then meticulously painted in all the browns of hare,
toast brown, tawny, dim, pipe-tobacco brown of hare,
olive, fawn, topaz, bone brown until the hare
became dimensional under your hand, the thick hare

fur, the mottled shag, the nobility of the nose, the hare
toenails, black and sharp and curved, and the dense hare
ears, pod-shaped, articulated, substantial, erect, hare
whiskers and eyebrows, their wiry grace, the ruff of hare
neck fur, the multi-directional fur over the thick hare
haunches, and did I say the dark inside the hare

ears, how I want to follow the darkness of the hare
and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare
ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare
anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare
cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare
reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare

eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare
eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare
pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare’s
eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare’s
unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare
as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare

on the page, the thin hair of your brush and your own hair
waving gold down your back, hair I see as you see the hare.
In the hare’s eye you see me there, my swaying black hair.

Diane Seuss
Selected by Joan Barasovska; appears in Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018). Albrecht Dürer’s painting is titled “Young Hare.”

I’ve selected this ekphrastic poem because it reflects the artist’s fascination with capturing an exact likeness of nature, his extravagant love of the animal so clearly displayed, and the paradox of killing or caging the hare in order to worship it. Diane Seuss’s masterful craft—see the line endings—and genius for description are on display here.

– Joan Barasovska / Chapel Hill, North Carolina