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Two Words – Betty Adcock

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 12, 2025| 3 Comments »

 . 
[ two poems by Betty Adcock]
 . 
Two Words
 . 
++++ for Gerald Barrax
 . 
Far west of this late afternoon,
mountains I’ve never seen search California’s
sky for snowdrifts. I can only guess
at shapes of trees and flowers
born of such high thrift.
On the flats below, nothing greens.
Rainshadow.
++++++++++++It is a word for thirst.
 . 
In my country, small birds are surging
into October. They gather at dusk,
their pillar of smoke swirling
over the dead chimney,
a dream getting ready to dive,
the fire going backward.
Swifts.
++++++++It is a word for visible wind.
 . 
Imagine the lives of such words.
Subtle as the interiors of antique jars,
they shape their enclosed dark
because we hold them to be;
and name after name, they give us the many.
 . 
If we should break the clay,
as we can, able to do anything,
believing as we do in no vessel,
believing in fragments, in nothing –
night would step out, the old
wild messenger
bearing the same steep shade,
the same configurations of black wings.
 .  . 
Whatever we hoped to say,
it was there all the time.
 . 
Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001. First published in Nettles (1983).
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Revenant
 . 
Horizontal in my green coat,
resting my head on a log, I must have seemed
some part of autumn that refused to turn,
under the flicker’s scissoring and squirrel’s
scribble against an iron sky.
 . 
And this is a simple story. Let loose
it will run by itself to the place
where blanched sun laced through near-bare branches
and the day seemed to pour from the hawk’s gyre.
 . 
To doze in the woods is to rest on the hard edge
of fear, so you’re awake
to what you can neither see nor dream
nor come at with a name.
And yet I thought at first of hikers
in that crash of leaves, a sound that dimmed
at the edges then came back all wrong
because there was no order in it,
no human rhythm.
 . 
I did not quite cry out but froze the moment
I saw him see me, saw the heavy-antlered head
alter its slant.
He moved in the slow way animals will seem
to move in children’s picture books,
on each page larger, clearer –
until he was so close I saw the shine
on raised black nostrils,
and I though stupidly of creeks,
how they go black with mystery
underneath the winter’s lens of ice.
 . 
Browsing the leaf-quilted floor, huffing,
the deer edged closer, stopped, his eyes on mine;
and the moment went sly as a dream, the world
unhinged a little, light with reckoning and change.
But there was no revelation. None.
No help for the poet’s old protean
longing to become, to be undone.
 . 
Whole minutes – two? three? A look, a tangle
of otherness tight as bramble, odd
as a long fall. Noting
had ever happened or ever would
while I could hear that stranger-breath and see
each separate shoulder-hair shift color as he blew
a snort like a horse’s. How exact the hoof’s design
on fallen leaves, lifting and setting down
with such small sound I might be still alone.
 . 
And someone now is saying this is one of those
dense and symbol-laden moments poets make
to force and tease, the whole thing false
with sexual curvature and hidden weight.
This could be the father coming back
in the form he killed. Or the father’s
nemesis. Or it could be a sweet communion,
that old lie.
 . 
Finally huge and motionless as a tree
and nearer than my senses wished to know,
he took on, like a cloak, the simple dusk.
And if that looks like poetry, like loss,
the shadow of loss, or memory like black water
on his sides, the let it be
these words as good as any.
++++++++++++++++++++He leapt straight up
as if to lose that covering thought.
He turned and caught
the barest gilding of last light
and stirred the leaves to sharp explosion
and was gone. A distant brushy rustle.
 . 
It took me longer to begin to leave.
Some tears shook from me without regret or reason,
a kind of backward praise. For what,
I neither know nor quite forget.
 . 
Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001. First published in The Difficult Wheel (1995).
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Betty Adcock was six years old when her mother died. Could losing your entire world at such an age cause you to hold more fiercely and deeply to your new world through all the days that follow? Her poetry pierces me with the painful acuity of its remembering, its seeking, its discovering. There is always another question, another quest. She never arrives at a comfortable shore.
 . 
Betty often uses tangible artifacts as anchors for her narrative – an old photo of her on the day of her mother’s funeral, her father’s wood carvings that she must clear from his old roll-top desk after his death. The artifact, however, is servant to her imagery, which wrenches and lofts and growls in the throes of imagination. Today I helped my father set up a little Christmas tree in his nursing home room. When I cleaned out his attic last year, I selected from within his and Mom’s many boxes of Christmas decorations a shoebox full – less breakable, more memorable. As we pulled them out and placed them on the tree today, I imagined where they may have come from, why this or that one in particular might have been chosen or crafted or purchased.
 . 
Dad barely commented to see most of the ornaments; their stories are beyond him now. Loss and diminishment is the story I was prepared to bring home with me. But in the bottom of the box I found two angel silhouettes cut from cardboard, hand decorated with glitter. Dad chuckled when I turned them over to show their clothes pin hangers and names in pencil, “Bobby G.” on one and the other “Billy.” As I was leaving, Dad gazing rapt at the handsome tree, he turned and said, “Thank you for bringing this to me.” Loss, diminishment, preservation, memory. Joy?
 . 
❀
 . 
Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)
 . 
Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.
 . 
Additional poetry by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image — 
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Thank you for visiting VERSE and IMAGE:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE and IMAGE using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
IMG_1827
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Release the Distances – Betty Adcock

Posted in family, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[two poems from Intervale]
 . 
Poem from November
 . 
The leaves have fallen, releasing the distances.
This year of my turning moves
in an arc like a preying bird’s,
purposeful.
 . 
My loves have dried. I find
I can remember only the least things:
mouse-gray of my grandmother’s hair
dead in the silverbacked brush,
the smell of hardpacked dirt
under black grease in the smokehouse.
 . 
Here is the old sky, the one we always had.
Everything in it is small,
punctuation for a vanished story.
 . 
I have forgotten the trick
an old man taught me: how the voice
can be made to nest in the cupped hands,
calling. Was it the dove
or the owl I brought close then?
There was a calling.
Something came.
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Penumbra
 . 
The child in the cracked photograph sits still
in the rope swing hung from a live oak.
Her velvet dress brims with a lace frill.
 . 
Her pet Bantam is quiet in her lap.
It is the autumn day of a funeral
and someone has thought to take a snap-
 . 
shot of the child who won’t be allowed
to go to the burying – the coffin in the house
for days, strange people going in and out.
 . 
She’s dressed as if she’d go, in the blue church-
dress from last Christmas, almost too short.
The rooster loves her, she guards his perch
 . 
on her lap, his colors feathering the mild air.
She concentrates on this, now that her father
is unknowable, crying in his rocking chair.
 . 
Her mouth knife-thin, her small hands knotted hard
on the ropes she grips as if to be rescued.
She’s growing a will that won’t be shed
 . 
and something as cold as winter’s breath
tightens in her, as later the asthma’s vise
will tighten – hands on the throat, the truth.
 . 
Black and white, she is hiding
in every one of my bright beginnings.
Gold and deep blue and dark-shining
 . 
red the cockerel’s feathers, gold the sun
in the skyblue southern fall, blue
over the four o’clocks and the drone
 . 
of weeping that drains like a shadow from the house
where someone is gone, is gone, is gone –
where the child will stay to darken like a bruise.
 . 
I am six years old, buried
in the colorless album.
My mother is dead.
I forgive no one.
 . 
Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
This is the season of perfect-family photos arriving by text after reunions for feasting or bursting from the envelopes of early Christmas cards. These cousins with their complimentary sweaters on the front steps, their lovely smiling children and companions. I spent the first day with my father after our dual week-long Covid quarantine helping him watch a home movie from 1936, his little sister on a tricycle, he barefoot astride his cousin’s pony. His aunts and grandmother crossed in the greytone background like hovering angels or benevolent wardens. And then the next reel, in color, my father in white t-shirt is twenty-six and I am a flame-haired infant in my grandfather’s arms.
 . 
These two poems and others in this collection by Betty Adcock take me deeper than I’ve ever labored into my own past. She sees everything. What no one but she had yet noticed, the voices, the smells, all are now alive in her sharp, unsentimental, raven-eyed truth telling. What memories are waiting half-asleep for each of us? What memories call us to create them fresh from fragments and tales and slowly disintegrating histories? A few words from Betty Adcock and forgotten ghosts materialize. There was a calling. Something came.
 . 
❀
 . 
Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)
 . 
Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.
 . 
Another poem by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image:
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Thank you for visiting VERSE and IMAGE:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . every Saturday I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
                            https://griffinpoetry.com/about/
 . 
Also note: after January 1, 2026 I will no longer be sending separate weekly email reminders.
If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to VERSE and IMAGE using the button on the Home Page.
 . 
If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to
 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . – Bill
 . 
2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Who?

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 31, 2025| 5 Comments »

 .
 . 
[with 3 poems by Robin Greene]
 . 
Everyone is Someone Else
 . 
Everyone is someone else tonight.
Sitting on hallway stairs, bowl of packaged candies
on my lap, I rise to greet four princesses – facemasks
hard and identical, two Energizer bunnies,
an army soldier in fatigues, and three wise men –
brothers they tell me. Later, as my son peels off
his Ninja costume to sleep in the chaos of his take,
two new moons, discovered around Uranus,
appear on CNN. And strangely, Uranus
is one of his spelling words this week.
The world seems driven by repetitions:
the ant’s legs scrambling across the kitchen tile,
sheet rain blowing against window glass,
the perennial grass relentless beneath
our feet. Robert Creeley once removed
his glass eye in a poetry workshop and described life
as a dress rehearsal, but never said for what . . . .
And once there was a man I loved and married.
We made three babies, but one died inside me,
and I bled for a month. Sometimes I pretend
that shit like this just happens, and whatever
meaning I search for is like searching for the faces
of strangers on this Halloween: behind masks
are masks, behind motion is motion.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but (even) then face to face.
I Corinthians 13:12 (KJV – adapted)
 . 
Is everyone someone else, or just me? Am I who I seem to be, and would I let you know if I weren’t? I was that kid in English class who read every story in the book even though only four were assigned. I was the guy mixing and measuring in the back of the lab while the chemistry teacher was up front confounding the class. In college they had to drag me out of the science building every night when it closed. I chose medicine as my profession from some hazy expectation that it would let me keep learning new stuff all my life.
 . 
Now in my closing decades I want to say, “Stop! I’ve learned enough!” I don’t need to know any more than I do right now about all the hard stuff. Parent, caregiver, worrier, fuckup – enough! There is only one way, however, that life will finally drag you out of the classroom. To paraphrase a caution about Nature: Life gives you the test first, then teaches you the lesson.
 . 
A mirror, like a person, ages. Over a century shiny metal applied to glass tarnishes and darkens. It reveals its pits and blemishes. Attrition, wearing down, is not far from contrition, wearing ashes. Paul writing his first letter to the Corinthians expects us to outgrow our foolishness and confusion, set aside childish ways and think like grownups. He dangles the promise that we may experience eternity with God face to face. I hope that’s true, that my self is more durable than my molecules, but I wonder about all this learning and knowing in the meantime. Life – has it been worth it? Even the person who passes with an “A” still answered 5% wrong. That adds up to a lot of foolishness and confusion I am carrying.
 . 
Even gazing into a dark mirror, I still see myself face to face. Who is that looking back? All the knowing I’ve tried so hard to accumulate and hold onto, all the elements I’ve combined into myself, in that mirror they become shadows fading away at the periphery. The person in that mirror – who is he really? Perhaps on my final day, when the blazing light of the universe is revealed and ultimate mysteries are mysterious no longer, I will also see, clear and defined, face to face, me.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Necklace
 . 
Under cool running water, my mother clutches
a knife, debones chicken breasts the color
 . 
of a winter moon; I’ll never be a woman,
I think and rise from my half-lotus
 . 
on the countertop – eight years-old –
my flat, tight body still an ally.
 . 
My mother and I never speak of this
apprenticeship, field archeologist
 . 
I’ve become, unearthing the glyphs
and ruins of my gender
 . 
until my father and brother arrive,
noisy as blind men,
 . 
bumping their way across the linoleum tiles –
breaking our silence
 . 
as though it were neither real
nor holy.
 . 
Later, the smells of cologne, hairspray
filter through the house.
 . 
Steam from the iron sizzles
on its aluminum pad
 . 
as mother presses
my father’s slacks and shirt,
 . 
and sets up snacks for the babysitter –
fashioning each small part of our lives
 . 
as though they were hand-made beads
for a necklace some Inca woman
 . 
might make and pass down
to her only daughter.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Just as an earthquake or long drought may expose new strata to the paleontologist’s questing eye, so a pile of books tumbling off a desk. Robin Greene wrote these poems in Lateral Drift twenty-five years ago. When I open the book today for the first time, how powerfully the lines still reach out to me and into me. How truthfully they speak; how in the present they are; how they open themselves, and me. Who is the voice in these unsheathed knives of stories? Who was she then, and is she still? But why even ask such a thing? The poems are who they are made to be; they carry the light and the darkness they were created for.
 . 
Better to ask instead, Who am I as I read these poems? I am a man opening myself to receive the truth of a woman’s struggles and the marrow of her knowing. I am a person old enough to have grandchildren yet I become a child and a young parent and Lord knows what in the tangle and turbulence of these stories. I am someone who knows little, perhaps nothing at all, until I am willing to sit down for a moment in this silence filled with words.
 . 
After I’ve read the book, read it through a second time, spoken some poems, typed out a few favorites in order to learn them through my fingers as well as through my eyes and breath, then I turn back to the title page and test memory and find this: 11/17/01 To Bill, Best wishes, Robin Greene. Time is not metallic, unspooling keen enough to slice you if you try to hold it still or alter its shape; time is froth and broth and no telling what may next boil to the surface. There you discover the one advantage of having lived seventy years  – you have plenty to add to the stew.
 . 
❦
 . 
Robin Greene has bubbled and boiled plenty since she signed my copy of Lateral Drift. She is cofounder of Longleaf Press and also cofounder of Sandhills Dharma Group. She retired as Professor of English and Writing, and Director of the Writing Center at Methodist University in Fayetteville, NC. She continues to write and publish poetry, fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Hendersonville, NC.
 . 
Robin Greene – Artist’s Statement
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What the Leaves Said
 . 
As I walked in the woods today,
early October, the leaves fell –
 . 
individually – through stark, shining air,
until one of them unfolded its
 . 
blood-red palm in my outstretched
hand and whispered a word
 . 
before joining its kin on the forest floor.
I had stopped for a moment, noticing
 . 
sunlight opening up shadows,
shifting its radiance in light wind
 . 
across the new landscape as leaves
shook from beech and oak,
 . 
and I listened: one word becoming
many, becoming one.
 . 
Robin Greene
from Lateral Drift, Windows on History Press, Durham NC; © 2002
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
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