V E R S E and I M A G E

The day we made the world, scattered

shattered sand across the deep

steeps and hollows of the sea,

we were playing with chance,

a stance few other gods admired.

We retired then from creation and let things

sing as they would, go

to whatever end luck called good.

We could, and did, breath in a platypus here,

a shearwater there – evolution

our solution to dogma and fate,

the weight of always being in charge

of stars, shoals, plague, all that –

but by and large, we let go, let

sweat and thought fall away,

stray like questing possums

or blossoms of blown snow.

So it was. We didn’t worry how

our sowing would grow. We went back

to hacking with our thick

black bills at death and waste, harrying

carrion, even as the dead

bled ever more numerous over the new

true-straight roads, here

where we shaped the bright turns

and returns of the world, invited

night in: do that, and you get

what you get. Despised

as flies, we pick through pale grass

for carcasses gone flat and dry;

we rise under your very wheels

from meals scant and cold, bring

strings of gut back to our young. But so

goes the world, when you let it go,

throw yourself in its rolling motion, chance

chance: we live on broken squirrels

in the world we made this way.

from By Stone and Needle, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2025; winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for 2025

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The postmark is 03-09-97. Linda found the torn envelope, letter inside, at the bottom of a box of mementos she’s still sorting from her parents’ home after their deaths over a decade ago. Dear Dad . . . It’s me writing to my father-in-law, the nuclear physicist. I’ve got an idea for a new story and I need your help. Dad French and I would sometimes share first drafts with each other, his hard science fiction that could use a cool breath or two of metaphor, my airy prose in desperate need of some fact checking. So here’s my pitch:

Relative is the operative word. Dad French was an Einsteinian guru. His favorite Saturday afternoon pastime was to lean back on the couch with a big yellow legal pad and work through the equations of Special Relativity. He felt that he had identified a flaw and was determined to elucidate (from the Latin, “bring it into the light”). The most I could understand from his explanations of time dilation is that any object, whether charged particle or self-aware being, as it approaches the speed of light experiences a slowdown in the passage of time. To me on that spaceship there’s no difference in the ticking of my clock, but if my buddy back on earth could listen in he’d hear an expanding silence between each tick and the next.

But big deal. Who hasn’t felt time speed up or slow down in certain situations? Man, last week was so busy it just flew by.  – or – I feel like I’ve been sitting in this waiting room for a week. We human beings are just rubbish at time. If you asked that charged particle, it would know to the femtosecond how long since it got spat out of the cyclotron. My perception of time, though, is all tangled with context and saturated with subconscious. Don’t even ask me how long I’ve been sitting here at this keyboard, much less whether a certain something happened five years ago or ten.

Which is why, when I wake up in the dark, I avoid looking at the clock. If I should still happen to be lying there with my brain in fifth gear when light begins to seep around the shades, when any hope of re-entry into the land of Nod is laughable, then I don’t want to know how long it’s been. I don’t want to know that I’ve just spent two hours on this inventory of all my faults and failings. Surely no more than a handful of ticks. Grant me the bliss of imagining I’m half way to Proxima Centauri at nine-tenths the speed of light and I have all the time in the universe.

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Oh, and here is what else I found in that old envelope along with the letter: a Post It stuck to the page with these lines in Dad French’s handwriting.

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You couldn’t say bluegills create the stream.

Torn from the stream, they choke

on blazing air. And yet. Those nests,

those few dozen shallow divots together

pocking the creek bottom in dimples

rich with sunfish generations: changing

creekbed, reshaping foundation.

That steady fan-flow of air-

bearing water over eggs settled among

the pebbles, ever so slightly changing

the river’s braiding and unbraiding. That labor

of life: the work to work

with the current as it is and yet

to change it just enough, to manifest

a place a little better for bluegills, co-creating

the world in concert with oxygen exchange,

tectonic motion, that smashed and gash-

edged hubcap pinning down an immortal

plastic bag, the gravity of the moon, whirligig

beetles inscribing creek-skin with runes

written in water, whatever God you say. Flood

of protestors in the street’s torrent, choking

on blazing air. A woman stirring cut

onions over heat, changing them just enough

to turn their burning tears to something

a little more sweet. Fingers moving the pen, the keys,

the lever, and the air and ground

of our lives ever so slightly shifting

in response, recreated (ever so slightly) anew.

The fearful fact: it matters what you do.

from By Stone and Needle, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2025; winner of the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for 2025

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What is left for us to believe in? What even matters? When hate is the day’s currency, those who can’t bring themselves to live on hate are emptied and cast aside. As if! Whatever. It’s all just relative, anyway. But stone is still stone, underfoot, under earth, under all, and if you rub the lodestone along the needle and suspend it by a thread, it will still swing north.

And so these poems. Crows and bluegills continue to create the universe and stirring onions in a skillet continues to make the world just that much sweeter. There is still truth you can pin down, categorize, calculate, and right alongside that truth is the truth of breath, discovery, awe. I am not afraid to say it, Catherine: you make me believe that even I matter. How could any of us walk through a world that smells a little of skunk; feel sun on our face while the grass turns that sun into sugar; tremble one moment at the closeness of death and the next moment laugh as life surprises us; travel these lines of verse into strange realms and incantations that transform into our own familiar muscle and blood and mind; how could we do all this and not discover that we matter and that this planet we love matters?

I believe. That there is still hope for us all. And for all that surrounds us.

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Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

If you read one book of poetry this year, make it By Stone and Needle. These poems are comforting and harrowing, enlivening and enlightening. They are true.

I featured two additional poems from the collection at last weeks posting (October 10, 2025).

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