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Treats

Posted in Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2024| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by AE Hines]
 . 
A foot of new snow
 . 
and down the middle
+++++ of our icy street
a dawn congregation
+++++ of ravens, all blue-black
and wing, hunch
+++++ in their strange bureaucracy,
as if arrived to divide
+++++ the daily assignments. Even
at this age, I still see signs. Even
+++++ a gathering of black birds
on a snow-covered road,
+++++ a Rorschach test
that conjures a warning
+++++ in my anxious machinery:
 . 
an assembly of plague doctors –
+++++ with folded feather arms, dark
nodding heads. I wonder what
+++++ they are here to tell me.
None of us is promised green lights
+++++ and straightaways, but sometimes
the bloodwork comes back
+++++ quietly, the tumor
benign. Sometimes, just up the road
+++++ from where you lie in bed,
brakes give way and barrel
+++++ a terrified trucker across four
frozen lanes into your
+++++ could-have-been path.
 . 
AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Imagine you really like to eat. No, I don’t mean you enjoy sitting down at the table, plate in front of you, bite by bite, chew & swallow, push away and say, “That was good!” What I’m talking about is when your eldest son calls and asks, “How’re you doin’?”, the first thing out of your mouth is, “For supper I had . . .”
 . 
It’s a blessing that Dad likes to eat. My experience from forty years of geriatric practice is that once you lose your appetite you’re going to have a tough time ever finding it again. The first thing Dad usually brings up when we talk is what he needs me to pick up at the store. He’s thinking two meals ahead, tonight’s supper, tomorrow’s breakfast. He can’t walk as far as the kitchen any more, he can’t rummage through the cupboards or the fridge, in fact there may not be many things left in life for him to enjoy, but he can think about something good to eat.
 . 
That’s why this morning I’m poking around in the freezer and shifting unidentifiables in the back of the refrigerator, holding a shopping list and a yellow pad. Besides chucking out the old and vaguely greenish, I’m making Dad a list. A “MENU” I’ll leave at his bedside. There’s a column for meals in the fridge, a column for freezer, and at the bottom is that most important header of all: TREATS. I found four kinds of cookies in the pantry. Four flavors of pudding we originally bought for Mom. Chocolate brownies with M&M’s his cousin June brought by. Some zucchini bread a neighbor dropped off (and it is good). Please don’t forget the Trader Joe’s Vanilla Ice Cream.
 . 
From here, then, it’s off to Harris Teeter. I’m sure I’ll see some more things Dad would like as I cruise the aisles. They say the olfactory sense is tightly cross-linked to the hippocampus – a familiar smell instantly evokes vivid memories of old associations. I suspect for Dad the gustatory sense is equally evocative. Maybe he needs a little country ham with red eye gravy. Maybe spoon bread or hushpuppies. Maybe I can find the recipe for Mom’s famous German chocolate cake.
 . 
In our final days, may we all treat ourselves to what brings us joy.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Eden
 . 
I recall placing ripe plantain on the lowest
branch of eucalyptus, and the tree
filling with small wings: toucans
and motmots, a flock of miniature finches
dusted with pale blue chalk. There are so few
days I would – if I could – set on repeat
and live over and over:
+++++++++++++++++ Here, the man
I love, sight of him a reviving breath,
carrying plates of chorizo and fried eggs.
Then the two of us reclined in dappled grass,
drinking hot chocolate from a single,
chipped cup beneath prehistoric ferns
that tower and sway just as they must have
with the world still new.
+++++++++++++++++ I like to pretend
then too – didn’t I? – that we were the first
and last of our kind, a multitude
of wings beating the air under a sun
that never set, our queer, middle-aged bodies
never a day older.
 . 
AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Some quiet evenings I go out / to sit with them, all the men / I’ve been . . .
 . 
When has there ever been an evening that quiet? A space filled with invitation and empty of demands? When has my mind ever been that pliant, willing to contemplate such things much less able? Is there a garden somewhere waiting for each of us, waiting for our return?
 . 
Adam in the Garden by AE Hines offers no simple answers but it certainly invites questions. These poems span many years and many situations; even more so they span the many conditions of one human person. Broken and reborn, dead and exalted – you nor I are not one immutable creature, none of us an unvarying beam transiting the years allotted to our individual existence. If we discover a quiet moment and stop to think, we may discover the many persons we have been and are being.
 . 
Where could there be such a quiet space? Turn the page. Again. The poet invites us to join him here. He makes himself vulnerable to our gaze. He makes no other demand on us than to enter the quiet with him, to be with him and with our selves. And truthfully, I confess that I need this! I need the quieting of all those voices, external but really mainly internal, the quieting which is required to read a poem. Not to escape myself but to sit down with myself. Thank you for the invitation and for the welcome. Thank you for the sharing. It is, I assure you, a treat.
 . 
❦
 . 
Adam in the Garden by AE Hines is published by Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts, Inc., through Charlotte Lit Press.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Green Satin
 . 
++++++++++++++for Ginny
 . 
Perhaps, it’s not the drugs
when you tell me you plan
to come back as a tree, wearing
 . 
green satin gowns and scarves
made of wind. No more ridiculous,
you say, than dying, or your wig
 . 
teetering from the nightstand.
Last night, a cypress lifted its dark
roots from the earth, and lay down
 . 
Like a great, leafy-maned beast
across your yard, making room
for more morning
 . 
to flood your window, dawn
a spotlight across a hospice bed
where you labor over breathing,
 . 
a potter over clay, spinning
and kneading the mud of yourself
into finer and finer pieces.
 . 
“It must be time,” you tell me,
with summer’s sun shining
and sparrows flinging
 . 
shadows on your walls.
When even the cypress lies down
and points the way home.
 . 
AE Hines
from Adam in the Garden, Charlotte Lit Press, Charlotte NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦

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Life Sucks

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2024| 24 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Mark Smith-Soto]
 . 
Sunroom Twilight
 . 
Another thunk against the window glass,
another broken wing or neck, as like as not,
another muted spill of feathers on the grass –
I love this space, but it’s been dearly bought.
 . 
Of course, the same might well be said
of the lamb we grilled last night, honoring
its sacrifice with salad and good bread.
The whole-grain loaf, the baby kale, everything
 . 
sundered from daylight for my sake,
floods the mind in unforgiving surge,
sweeps me into the sobering give / take
 . 
that underpins life / death. In the sun’s wake,
birdsong dapples the gold air with its dirge.
Or rather, hymn of wonder; my mistake.
 . 
Mark Smith-Soto
from Daybreak, Unicorn Press, Greensboro, NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Passenger side floorboard there’s a Mason jar of flowers, black-eyed susan and zinnia, marigold and mint. I cut them from our garden this morning for Mom’s bedside table. On I-77 South just past Jonesville there’s a field of sunflowers blooming, another field near the coverleaf with 421, all looking southeast right now because it is still morning. I’m driving to Winston to visit Mom and Dad in Kate B. Reynold’s Hospice Home. Life surely does suck. Life surely is exalted.
 . 
This is a respite care admission, scheduled so we can upgrade their bathroom and bedroom. Make their home more liveable while dying. Their dates of death are not clearly visible to us over the horizon, certainly not etched in stone, but how distant can they be? Is this what people mean when they say live one day at a time? Mom can still laugh when we joke around, although each day a bit more of her releases into airy nothingness. Dad’s crash has been more sudden, broken neck, delirium, bedfast, but he still seems to add a few more good minutes to each ensuing day. All three of their children will be under the same roof today, now that’s red-letter. We’ll be helping them with lunch, sitting with Mom in the flower garden for a half hour, logrolling Dad in bed to rub ointment on his back. And while the two nap, we three will have a long conversation in another room about next week, and the weeks after.
 . 
Yesterday afternoon my son called after he returned from a few hours visit with his grandparents. Josh took Granddaddy grits and collards and says he spent most of their visit eating. Yeah! Josh has been afraid to see the changes in the two up close and had put been putting this day off for months. I told him I know he still hurts from Jonathan, his best friend all through school, right after graduation the cancer. But then at the end of talking, Josh says to me, “So how are you doing, Dad?”
 . 
Don’t get that question a lot and even less often do I say anything more than, “Fine.” I hear the sincerity when Josh asks. All the drive down today and all the drive back what I’m really thinking about is how to continue the conversation. I’ll stop at his house before I get home to drop off a cooler he left at Granddaddy’s house. I’ll begin by taking him outside and telling him how much I appreciate what he said. I’ll ask how he’s doing. And then I’ll ask another – rehearsed in my head for days, weeks, months: “And how are you doing on your path to quit drinking?” Life can surely do its best to convince you it sucks. But I have a feeling the two of us standing in the driveway for a half hour talking is going to show life it doesn’t have to.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Segue
 . 
Now that you mention it: death,
the cherry outside the kitchen
in full bloom, the novel I left
open on my bed, the stitch in
 . 
my side riding a rib, the small
hole at the center of my retina
where nothing registers at all,
the rip in the screen letting in a
 . 
gnat adrift on the whiff of daphne
blooming along the broken driveway,
the sudden abandon of your laugh, me
forgetting what I was going to say,
 . 
closing my eyes, holding my breath,
and now that you mention it, death.
 . 
Mark Smith-Soto
from Daybreak, Unicorn Press, Greensboro, NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The poet notices a little something, a little nothing, really: breakfast, a chess board, chalk dust; light across a woman’s profile, flowers that shouldn’t be there, a word that carries on its back two meanings. Common things, every day things. The poet notices and his smile as he points out what he has noticed is almost sly; the pointing is all about what he’s not quite saying. Then all at once you notice, too. And you smile.
 . 
In Mark Smith-Soto’s world you might discover wonder in commonplace, joy in commonalities, mystery in what we share and have always shared without noticing that we do. You might join him in memories that make you cry, realizations that lift from within you a deep sigh, possibilities that sober you right down before they exalt you. In Mark’s ultimate collection, Daybreak, every single one of the 56 sonnets has touched me, gently but insistently, until I admit I’m relieved: I am / a human being. I’m pretty sure of that. [Biology Lesson]. After reading these poems, I begin to notice the flowers in the cracks of my walkway with new eyes; they implore me that death [is] a lifetime of hours away [Aria da Capo].
 . 
During the years of this twenty-first century, my orbit and Mark’s intersected only a handful of times, for only a handful of hours. But what gravity and what luminosity! In life I knew Mark only a little; I am glad to know him much more in poetry.
 . 
❦
 . 
Mark Smith-Soto (1948-2023) was born in Washington, DC, and lived in Costa Rica until the age of 10, when his bilingual family returned to Washington, his father’s native city. Mark’s awards include a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NC Writers Network’s Persephone Competition for his chapbook Green Mango Collage, among many others. Daybreak is his seventh poetry collection and is available from Unicorn Press in Greensboro, NC.
 . 
Thank you, Michael Gaspeny, for sending me Mark’s book as a gift. A treasure.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
There You Are
 . 
I do feel somehow exiled here, outside
the frame – just what is it about a woman
at an open window, seen from the side,
an opalescent half light on her hands
 . 
holding the curtains apart, head tilted,
questioning? Maybe her gaze has stranded
on the naked lady half-hidden by the shed,
a blossom she knows she never planted,
 . 
her wondering, These small, random gifts,
why do they touch one so? But of course,
I can’t begin to guess her mind, it’s
 . 
me trespassing here, I should go before
she sees me, leave her to her thoughts –
“Oh, there you are, amor. Come look at this.”
 . 
Mark Smith-Soto
from Daybreak, Unicorn Press, Greensboro, NC; © 2024
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2016-10-17a
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The Way Home

Posted in family, music, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 3, 2024| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Joy Harjo]
 . 
And the blessing began a graceful moving through the grasses of time, from the beginning, to the circling around place of time, always moving, always
++++++++ from Bless This Land, Joy Harjo
 . 
❦
 . 
The Story Wheel
 . 
I leave you to your ceremony of grieving
Which is also of celebration
Given when an honored humble one
Leaves behind a trail of happiness
In the dark of human tribulation.
None of us is above the other
In this story of forever.
Though we follow that red road home,
one behind another.
There is a light breaking through the storm
And it is buffalo hunting weather.
There you can see your mother.
She is bus as she was ever –
She holds up a new jingle dress, for her youngest beloved daughter.
And fo her special son, a set of finely beaded gear.
All for that welcome home dance,
The most favorite of all –
when everyone finds their way back together
to dance, eat and celebrate.
And tell story after story
of how they fought and played
in the story wheel
and how no one
was every really lost at all.
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Last night I sat silent on stage waiting as a few early arrivals took their seats in the audience. We singers had a few more selections to rehearse before filing out to prepare our official entrance, and for now we waited. Shouldn’t I have been anxious in anticipation of the harmonies we would soon raise together? Shouldn’t I have been thrilled as the strings took their places and began to tune their instruments? Shouldn’t joy live here?
 . 
No, something dark nagged me. My heart was stone. I felt suspicious of these watchers, listeners. I was afraid of their grand and thriving church. I distrusted what they would think of me if they in turn suspected I didn’t think or believe precisely as they did. I told myself I was already rejected, on the outside. I didn’t belong here.
 . 
Joy Harjo writes, The old Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion / Because it divided the people. / . . . But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives. Where is the religion that makes relatives? People, plants, creatures, everything together as family? A religion that turns all people to face each other within the circle rather than turning them out? Linda and I had been thrashing with recent revelations that people were leaving our son’s church because one of the ministers has come out as gay. These people leaving – we thought we knew them, we considered them neighbors. We don’t understand the rejection, the turning apart. How can we understand?
 . 
When our chorus returns to our places before a full house, I don’t recognize many faces. But I do know a few, some from years in the past, and I remember I love them. Now lift our voices together and sing of a Creator who is always with us. We sing longing and loss, humor and fullness, songs like rivers that course and meander a long journey, that carry all the weight of time and earth. I sing. And at the end of the singing we have become one family.
 . 
The heart of stone has only hardened itself. Everything that lives wants to soften that heart. Everything that lives wants to open each heart to beauty and truth.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
from Exile of Memory
.    .    .
In the complex here there is a singing tree.
It sings of the history of the trees here.
It sings of Monahwee who stood with his warrior friends
On the overlook staring into the new town erected
By illegal residents.
It sings of the Civil War camp, the bloodied
The self-righteous, and the forsaken.
It sings of atomic power and the rise
Of banks whose spires mark
The worship places.
The final verse is always the trees.
They will remain.
.    .    .
When it is time to leave this place of return,
What will I say that I found here?
 . 
From out of the mist, a form wrestled to come forth –
It was many legged, of many arms, and sent forth thoughts of many colors.
There were deer standing near us under the parted, misted sky
As we watched, the smelled for water
Green light entered their bodies
From all leaved things they ate –
.    .    .
The Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion
Because it divided the people.
We who are relatives of Panther, Racoon, Deer, and the other animals and winds were soon divided.
But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives.
We made a relative of Jesus, gave him a Mvskoke name
.    .    .
We could not see our ancestors as we climbed up
To the edge of destruction
But from the dark we felt their soft presences at the edge of our mind
And we hear their singing.
 . 
There is no word in this trade language, no words with enough power to hold all this we have become –
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 

IMG_0262

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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
An American Sunrise opens with a map of a trail of tears, that of the Muscogee Creek Nation’s forced displacement to Oklahoma from their native homelands near Talladega, Georgia in the 1830’s. One of many trails of tears. In Joy Harjo’s preface she includes this plea and blessing: May we all find the way home.
 . 
Toward the close of the book, Joy Harjo describes how her Great-Grandfather Monahwee could bend time. The entire book is an experience of time and place bending, fluid, circular, all connected. We hear the voices of ancestors and offspring. We hear the voices of creatures on earth and of Earth herself. We are torn by hatred and injustice – we bleed. We smell the smoke of cook fires at dawn and feel the sun on our face – we are fed. We are challenged and re-challenged to connect ourselves to the thread of life that weaves through all people and all creation and leaves nothing out. As the poet says, Nobody goes anywhere / though we are always leaving and returning. And her experiences are, as for all of us . . . the giving away to history which in no means meant giving up. For a warrior it is not possible to give up. 
 . 
For any of us to find home, we must all find home. We must all witness cruelty and kindness in this land. From the book’s final poem, Bless This Land: Bless us, these lands, said the rememberer. These land aren’t our / lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land. May the poems and the songs bring all things into our memory and show us the way.
 . 
❦
 . 
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo; W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY © 2019. Joy Harjo served as Poet Laureate of the United States for three terms, 2019 through 2021.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beyond
 . 
Beyond sunrise, there is a song we follow
Beyond clouds traveling with rain humped
On their backs, lightning in their fists
Beyond the blue horizon where our ancestors
Appear bearing gifts, wrapped in blankets woven
With sun and strands of scarlet time
 . 
Beyond the footpaths we walk every day
From sunrise to kitchen, to work, to garden, to play
To sunset, to dark, and back
 . 
Beyond where the baby sleeps, her breath
A light mist of happiness making
A fine rainbow of becoming knowledgeable around us.
 . 
Beyond the children learning alphabets
And numbers, bent over their sticks and dolls
As they play war and family, grow human paths
 . 
Beyond the grandmothers and grand fathers
Their mothers and fathers, and in the marrow of their bones
To when that song was furs sung we traveled on
 . 
Beyond sunset, can you hear it?
The shaking of shells, the drumming of feet, the singers
Singing, all of us, all at once?
 . 
In the song of beyond, how deep we are –
 . 
Joy Harjo
from An American Sunrise, W. W. Norton, New York NY, © 2019
 .  
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a
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