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Yellow

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , on November 8, 2024| 14 Comments »

Wingstem, Verbesina alternifolia
 . 
[with 3 poems by Li-Young Lee]
 . 
The Unfound Room
 . 
She is humming in the other room.
 . 
Leaves are falling in one window
of the room in which I sit
listening to her.
 . 
Her voice comes to me
from another part of the house,
and with it
the image of her face.
Throughout our years together, that look of
 . 
absence from her body
and the melody it bears forth
 . 
and total presence to what she’s at
the time inclined to, her neck bent
toward the task or the thing her hands
are disposed to, possessed of, all of her
 . 
given, giving, all of her receiving the shape,
weight, texture, and grade of that particular
and momentary instant of her passing day.
 . 
O almost
all of her, since
part of her goes on humming
over and over that one slow phrase
of a song I can’t now place,
humming in a different part of our house,
 . 
While in the window before me
leaves are falling
from out of a gone part of our year.
 . 
She’s humming a wordless phrase, the song missing,
her voice bearing aloft a familiar bridge
broken off from the before and the after,
a fragment I know, scrap of music
 . 
arriving from some unfound room inside her
where the song entire sings,
the song replete
is singing, even as the dead I still love
have gone ahead, as promised,
to make the unknown nearly habitable.
 . 
Even while they, remembered, are left behind
in a past I can’t find anymore.
 . 
Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Autumn is the season of Yellow. Yellow is becoming and going. Yellow is arriving and leaving. Yellow is living again and dying again. As Yellow swells, it fills the ditches, the meadows, forest edges and waste lots. As Yellow fades it leaves feather tufts and seed heads – we wonder, will they sprout again? As Yellow drinks all the blue and green it grows to fill the canopy and the horizon. As Yellow fades, it reveals curvatures and twists and impossible angles – we wonder, is this what death looks like?
 . 
I am fickle. I am so easily tempted by pink and lavender, red and bright orange. And of course purple. Yellow, are you worth anything to me at all? You are so common it would seem to be no effort at all to find you, not worth the effort to see you. Easy to ignore you. But then I pause and shiver and if I’m blessed the shackles of time and distance fall away for a moment. Yellow, you have so many bodies and forms! You are so related and so disparate! Yellow, I will write a new song about you and the refrain will sound like this – wingstem, crownbeard, tickseed / sow-thistle, ragwort, coltsfoot / sunflower, coneflower, goldenrod / yellow, Yellow, YELLOW!
 . 
Autumn is born, Autumn lives, Autumn begins to die and Yellow flies from the ditches and the meadows into the songs of leaves – tuliptree, redbud, sugar maple. Yellow flies higher and curls to umber, ochre, brown butter. Delicious Yellow, raising the color of earth high and holding it for a day before it falls to become earth again. The season of dying again and living again. This season of leaving and arriving. Yellow, long may you reign.
 . 
Native Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa

Native Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa

 . 
Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans

Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans

 . 
Native Hog Peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata

Native Hog Peanut, Amphicarpaea bracteata

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Invention of the Darling
 . 
6.
 . 
The woman you love is singing.
Quick, tell her what you love.
 . 
Don’t tell her what you believe.
Don’t tell her if God is dead or alive.
Don’t tell her what’s wrong with the world
and how to fix everyone in it.
 . 
The woman you love is singing.
Her voice is laying a table in the presence of death.
The service shines, irradiating
the cardinal points,
dividing above from below.
 . 
Now is not the time to quote scriptures.
Now is not the time to repeat manifestoes.
The woman you love is alive
and singing, making a new world
out of all she loves.
 . 
Don’t remain outside of her song.
Whatever enters her singing lives again, twice-born.
And there’s only one way in.
Speak your love clearly.
 . 
So what if no one else can hear her.
So what if no one else witnesses her making
and re-making the world in the image of love.
 . 
Soon, her singing will stop,
and all you’ll hear is the confusion
and violence of a world untouched by her song.
 . 
Remaining outside of her singing has cost you so much.
Quick tell her what you love.
 . 
Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Is it I myself who blocks the doorway between me and love? Is death my adversary or my friend? Stop, you Poem, and explain yourself before you go any further! Oh, my poor analytical mind. Oh no, simultaneous equations and stoichiometry and metabolic pathways. Oh the one thing always corresponding exactly to the one other thing. Oh no, desire to make everything fit together.
 . 
And yet doesn’t it? Fit? Perhaps not with my graph paper right angular AB=XY. Not Isaac Newton and William Harvey (and only almost Schrödinger’s Cat). More like a star best seen when I look to its left. The smell of flowers in the woods when nothing is blooming. Or, in The Invention of the Darling, sense is falling petals, wings, the sky within and the sky without, The One and The Many and all of it fit together, all one, all many.
 . 
O Poem Reader, stop! Open your eyes and see the lines inviting you to follow them where there is no path. Close your eyes and see the lines circling and touching and kissing. They explain nothing and they explain everything. And when you have been kissed, you will surely know.
 . 
❦
 . 
Li-Young Lee lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the many honors awarded his verse are a Paterson Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. The Invention of the Darling, his seventh book, is available from W. W. Norton.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Going Along
 . 
Rocks.
Streams.
And falls.
 . 
You were making ready to go.
And then you were going.
And then you were gone.
 . 
The bud.
The flower.
The fruit.
 . 
You were leaving.
And then you’d just left.
And then I saw the sky
was a very big question,
and earth no answer.
 . 
And even the birds, the trees,
even the sun, moon, and stars looked like passengers
boarding at their numbered gates.
 . 
Your leaving was on both of our minds
while it lay ahead of you. But we
fast caught up to it, and you
occupied leaving completely,
with no room for another.
 . 
And soon it lay behind me, who was left alone
to fold your clothes and give them away,
even as you left leaving behind, as though leaving
were one more disguise.
 . 
And the whole world seems a moment
from your forgotten childhood,
or an old house someone abandoned in haste, leaving
the back door open wide.
 . 
Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall.
The years follow a very old song
my evry disappearing gesture accompanies,
my each step inflects,
one foot lifting me off the ground,
one foot setting me down on earth.
 . 
Walking, danging, running.
Late. On time. Out of breath.
 . 
Li-Young Lee
from The Invention of the Darling, W.W.Norton, New York, NY; © 2024
 . 
❦
 . 
Thank you to my friend Anne G. for the gift of Li-Young Lee’s book in the midst of all these leavings, Mom gone and Dad going, the sky a very big question and earth . . . an answer?
 . 
fungus
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22

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Panta rhei

Posted in poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 1, 2024| 7 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Melinda Thomsen]
 . 
11. Colorado Springs
 . 
In a breath, the sun emerges unfurled
behind the hangar, and the sky turns gold.
It burns like an ore, as nearby grasses roll
in a breeze, and rows of sunflowers twirl
 . 
and flex. The Queen Anne’s lace slowly maps
the sun’s route west. A magpie somewhere
near the playing field squawks. Dawn appears
in shades of granite wearing a mica cap.
 . 
Let me put on the sky’s sapphire chains
and earth’s necklace of headlights from the cars
winding to Denver in their jeweled train.
 . 
When headlamps dim, sunshine shoots like stars
off the cargo bays of arriving planes,
and daybreak shows its wealth by reaching far.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
[this poem is one segment of the poet’s sonnet redoublé]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The sentinel sugar maple stationed above us on the roadway is first. Each day we park at the track and look up to its expansive globe outstretched in meditation. Preceding all other trees, it affirms change. In the swelling conflict of its upper limbus butterscotch and sulfur, sweet and harsh become the beginning of leaving behind the green of summer. Green we might have convinced ourselves to be eternal and foundational. But all things flow. You can never stand twice beneath the same tree.
 . 
❦
 . 
Last night a brief gusty squall; this morning the lone sugar maple has relinquished all but a few scattered flags and tatters. As we enter the woods, however, all the other trees in this progressive congregation are industrious in their competition. Who can display the brightest color? Who the most varied, the most novel? The southern slant of sun penetrates as if through stained glass; streaming light proclaims its gospel of chlorophyll, abscission, anthocyanins, carotenoids. Linda and I drop our worries along the trail like a trail of breadcrumbs – we can at least hope that the birds and chipmunks will devour them all in the hour before we return this way.
 . 
And now we’ve reached the last straight segment before the walking trail offers to climb the ridge and lead back down to the river. We can see the turning where it beckons. Before we reach it we will cross the high bridge over Crooked Creek and look down to see if our fat water snake is sunning herself among the south-facing rocks as usual. Just beyond the bridge we will enter the final high vaulted cathedral. Overleaning trunks and branches, pointed arches familiar in the minds of trees long before Sumeria or Samarra, clad with brass and jade, they invite us now to share this space in reverence.
 . 
❦
 . 
This cathedral of flux. The never-changing God this world worships is the God of Changes. The crimson Michaux lilies that celebrated here in August today merely nod a few dry, creased, tri-partite pods, but what do they hold? A celebration of seeds. And beneath the springy duff the roots gone dormant have not forgotten their desire to rise again next April.
 . 
Linda and I stand here for a moment, in the moment. The memory of red blossoms is not what we worship. The anticipation of future blooming is not what we worship. Right here right now is the only real thing – the only real thing is all things that have come before and all that may yet become. We hold a single thought, we hold all thought. For one brief moment approaching joy we are engulfed, we merge with the flux.
 . 
Panta rhei. All things flow.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Dropping Sunrises in a Jar
 . 
When daybreak edged the earth,
++++ I would roll over – unlike the birds.
It was as if we lived in separate jars.
++++ Wrens whistle and chirp about flames
blooming into a ball at sunrise
++++ then hush with the sun’s full burning.
 . 
I used to sleep through the daily burning
++++ for I didn’t care much how the earth
rotated itself into another sunrise.
++++ But years later, I wondered why birds
got so excited about a horizon in flames.
++++ So much time, I’ve spent within a jar.
 . 
The birds, too, live in a sort of jar,
++++ but they focus outward and seem to burn
with a gratitude that fans their inner flame.
++++ See pelicans fly about the earth?
They dip and lift until the idea of bird
++++ becomes a winged embrace at sunrise.
 . 
When I traveled, I watched every sunrise
++++ to see night leave its door to morning ajar,
and in its wake, I heard the calls from birds.
++++ Each place began with its horizon burning,
though, and I worry our Goldilocks earth
++++ is ending. We choose to go in flames,
 . 
or up in smoke like a moth drawn to flame
++++ when just right gets too hot, but each sunrise
still unleashes warbling tenors upon the earth.
++++ For we don’t see birds flying into bell jars
or coal mines, do we? While forests burn
++++ in the west, in the east, squirrels and birds
 . 
gear up for hurricanes. Notice how birds
++++ of a feather fly from floods and flames?
Instead, I wake to the sky’s daily burning
++++ in these – my sunset – years to collect sunrises.
One by one, I drop then in a jar
++++ like candies gathered from my forgiving earth.
 . 
But this burning keeps flushing out the birds,
++++ who welcome the earth as if an old flame
and add their sunrise songs to its tip jar.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Melinda Thomsen lets no sunrise escape her. While the eye notices light returning to the world and the ear may welcome the first emphatic burst of wrensong, the soul delves deeper to discover that the light has never left. Some place where I can untangle myself through flashes of beauty – this is Melinda’s journey and her destination. And as we travel with her across the world and through the universe of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, this might be the promise we hope to fulfill – One day you’ll shape yourself into the bird your soul holds.
 . 
❦
 . 
These poems are woven with recurring images of sunrise and sky, birdsong and sunflowers, but in addition to these enticements Melinda’s use of formality has ensnared me. I am a sucker for a good sestina; this collection’s title poem is a great one. I had pretty much assumed it’s impossible to actually write a Heroic Crown of Sonnets (sonnet redoublé) but here Melinda has mastered it. In just 31 pages, this sequence elevates us and carries us into new worlds.
 . 
Purchase Dropping Sunrises in a Jar at Finishing Line Press.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Zoetrope Sunrise of the Taihang Mountains
 . 
Waking in a sleeper car, bunked
with three strangers, I raise the shade
 . 
to watch the sunrise, a pale peach glow,
among the snoring. Cornfields stretch
 . 
beneath gauzy clouds as our train enters
a tunnel and metal sounds reflect
 . 
off its stone interior. As we exit,
the ochre sky lightens, then another
 . 
tunnel and again a waterfall of noise.
Now, the sun glows behind mountain
 . 
peaks, and mist rests in the Taihang
valley of lush shrubbery when a tunnel
 . 
eclipses that view. The train
travels through tunnel after tunnel,
 . 
but between glimpses, the sun rises
and we emerge into a village
 . 
with streams edging the foothills
framed with cornfields and box houses.
 . 
A man feeds his donkey.
The child in our cabin coughs.
 . 
For the Chinese, the road over
Taihang means the frustrations of life.
 . 
Where the sun rises through slits,
this zoetrope carries me home,
 . 
or some place where I can untangle
myself through flashes of beauty.
 . 
I had to get out through stillness;
until bit by bit, the womb opened.
 . 
Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
 . 
[zoetrope: An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved. – – – bg]
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Three aphorisms attributed to Heraclitus (Greek, ca. 500 BC) declare change and conflict as the fundamental characteristics of reality:
On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not.
It is not possible to step into the same river twice.
The central tenets of Heraclitus’s philosophy are the unity of opposites and the centrality of flux (change) as encapsulated in the phrase Panta rhei, all things flow.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
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Chunky Hummer

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2024| 7 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
 . 
Innate
 . 
what does a hummingbird know
in its world of nectar and need
 . 
nightly forced to torpor
by the constant urge to feed
through staggering migration
 . 
are its dreams equally desperate?
 . 
does it wake hungry
ill-tempered with beauty
cramped with desire
 . 
suddenly alert to the nature of sugar
aware that satisfaction can only ever be
 . 
illusory
 . 
and what does the hummingbird sense
as it sips the flower’s allure
 . 
does it know of delicate meanings
pitched fever-tight
into its tiny world of furtive speed
 . 
dare I surmise anything?
 . 
maybe nectar is only a meal
sugar an ache that will pass
beauty an accident of form
 . 
and nothing means more than a wing
clasped into the air and released
 . 
effortless
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Hovering to sip sugar water, flicking your tongue into the red plastic flower, then dive bombed by a lance-tipped green blur – this is daily life for a hummingbird in the Eastern US. We only have the one species here, ruby-throated, and they do not play well with others. When it comes to a choice feeder there is no sharing, unlike the scene in the Western US where a cloud of a dozen birds, four or five different species, will jointly keep a feeder sincerely humming.
 . 
These last two weeks of September we have been visited hourly by the chunkiest hummingbird I have ever seen. The sleeker slimmer birds will chase her away but then she’s right back. (She-birds only; all the males have left for Central America by the end of August and these more svelte visitors and chasers have likely already burned fat as they’re migrating through from farther north). I realize hummingbirds have to bulk up each autumn, entering a period of hyperphagia before migration similar to black bears before hibernation, but this bird is a real hunk. She is going to have no problem making the 800 km flight from Florida to Yucatan, a natural miracle for such a tiny creature who, even at twice her normal body weight, still weighs only 6 grams – about the weight of a postcard, or of the well-sharpened pencil you’ll use to write a note to Guatemala to let them know to expect this ruby-throat in a couple of weeks.
 . 
❦
Audubon NC suggests continuing to fill hummingbird feeders until the second week in October. Abundant sugar will not deter the birds from setting out on their southward journey; their migration is triggered by light, or actually its absence, the diminishing length of day. All creatures live by their own internal clock. For some the clock’s ticks are soil temperature, snowmelt, the movement of water through earth; for others alarms are set by earth’s rotation and the stretch of sunlight and shadow.
 . 
And no creature lives in isolation. What if come clocks tick out of rhythm with the others? In the Western US, when broad-tailed hummingbirds arrive from their wintering grounds they depend on spring-blooming glacier lilies for nectar to replenish their exhausted energy. By 2012, however, biologists noted that the lilies were beginning to open seventeen days earlier than they had several decades prior. Some would already be withered before the hummingbirds even arrived. By 2050 the birds may completely miss the span of lily bloom.
 . 
Phenological mismatch is the term for this consequence of global climate change. What if migrating flycatchers miss their fly hatch? What if flowers bloom to no pollinators? Some species seem to benefit from early spring – marmots have a longer season to chow down and birth more marmettes. Some species can adapt to new timings but many can’t, especially as climate clocks accelerate their vagaries and variations. We can’t yet know all the consequences, but we know our children and grandchildren are experiencing a different world from the world in which we grew up.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Belyaev’s Foxes
 . 
When most only wanted their fur
Belyaev wanted their genes
 . 
He selected those he could touch
The ones who ate from his hand
 . 
Exerting curious pressure
On his wild silver stock
 . 
Closed in outdoor cages
To bear Belyaev’s chosen litters
 . 
Where is the gene for submission
For loyalty and bonding?
 . 
Somewhere, it seems
Connected to curly tails
 . 
White stars on the face
Flopped ears and blunt snouts
 . 
Wags and whines and barks
Which compete for favors
 . 
Other than food
So Belyaev’s foxes tamed the men
 . 
With prolonged puppyhood
And after thirty generations
 . 
Heeled happily across their yard
In through the open front door
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Embryology, cosmology, evolution . . . double helices, insect wings, quarks . . . mystery, contemplation, enlightenment: the poems of Alchemy wend their way through an expanding universe of discovery. There is scarcely a field of science or philosophy that Rae Spencer does not embrace in this collection, using language both precise and technical as well as elevated and elevating. This slim coverlet of atmosphere that supports us, this beneficent congregation of creatures within such mild extremes of warmth and moisture and light, how can one walking through such a place not be inspired?
 . 
And once inspired, what enters us to feed our hearts, what strikes a tonal chord within our minds What shall we believe in? What shall we hope for? Nothing is beneath our noticing; nothing is unworthy of praise. Perhaps the best way to receive Rae Spencer’s expansive embrace embodied in her universalistic collection is as, in the poet’s own words, a patchwork philosophy of wonder (Agnost).
 . 
❦
 . 
Rae Spencer is a veterinarian and lives in Virginia, USA. Alchemy is available at Kelsay Books.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Means of Dispersal
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
++++++++++++++++++ – Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species
 . 
He spent pages contemplating seeds
How some survived in seawater
Others in the crops of owls
In the feces of locusts
In the stomachs of fish
Frozen in icebergs
Dried in a clump of mud
Between the toes of a partridge
 . 
“In the course of two months,
I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds,
out of the excrement of small birds, and these
seemed perfect…”
 . 
How long in the garden?
Hovering over phials of curiosity
Some rank with the rot of failure
Others yielding green secrets
To the man who struggled to ask
Is there another explanation?
And in the end answered himself
With seed, with barnacles and pigeons
 . 
“…from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being,
evolved.”
 . 
So Darwin concluded
Without the benefit of Mendel’s peas
Or Watson, Crick, and Franklin’s helices
Without diffusion gels
Sequencers and microchips
Argument is as simple as a garden
Heavy and sweet with fruit
Ripe with answers
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Alchemy, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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