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Posts Tagged ‘imagery’

Spontaneous

Posted in family, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2024| 19 Comments »

 . 
 . 
[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]
 . 
Heaven
 . 
You wake in a sun drenched room
with knotty pine walls and open windows,
 . 
white curtains billowing. The warm,
salt-scented breeze carries
 . 
the sound of waves, the laughter of children,
the cry of gulls. Somewhere
 . 
inside the house, bacon sizzles in a pan,
coffee drips into a pot – and there are voices,
 . 
familiar voices – your grandmother,
your brother, your best friend. It’s been
 . 
so long since you have seen them.
So you sit up in bed, stretch your strong,
 . 
supple limbs. There is no pain,
no stiff shoulders and creaky joints.
 . 
There is no weight of sorrow or regret –
only a kind of soaring joy that lifts
 . 
and circles inside you like a kit.
And when you move across the floor,
 . 
it feels like floating, as if your body is made
of light and air – but solid when
 . 
they reach for you, when their arms
open wide and you walk in.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Spontaneous combustion – when a ten-year old reads about such a thing of course he’s going to think, Fire! Cool! My friends and I weren’t allowed to play with matches (although we could have swiped some from our Dads, all smokers, and we certainly smoldered plenty of stuff with our magnifying glasses during the Memphis summers). So fire blossoming up all on its own?! We scrounged an old t-shirt, sopped up some oil that had leaked from a lawn mower, and stashed the rags in a dark corner of Mike Slattery’s garage. And waited. I moved away from that neighborhood two years later and I have yet to hear that the garage burned down.
 . 
I have a friend with a gift. She can wake up in the morning first thing and fire off to the rest of us in the writers group what has just flowed from her pen into her journal. “Can” as in willing and able and unrestrained. Ten lines or twenty, she shares something always fresh, light breaking, a window open to her soul. Meanwhile, I’ve re-written this paragraph three times in my head, twice on paper, and six times on the screen. I need the t-shirt my brother-in-law Skip wears: “Hold on a minute while I overthink this.”
 . 
Now I’m stashing stuff in the car for this morning’s drive to Winston, errands to be accomplished for Dad: laptop, check; Power of Attorney docs, check. Wait, I was thinking of taking Dad some flowers from the front yard today. No, too tired. Next time.
 . 
And when might that next time arrive? Snipping zinnias, marigolds, anise hyssop, coaxing their stems into an old bread bag with a wet paper towel in the bottom, fitting the fresh bouquet into my cup holder – oh, my! Flames of purple and scarlet and bright orange, scent of mint and musky asters – pulling out of the driveway, how spontaneously I combust!
 .
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Sunflowers
 . 
In our well-manicured yard
where a clover can’t show its face
or risk dire consequences, a row
of sunflowers sprang up by the bird
feeder, claiming the kitchen
 . 
window for their own. Such thick
stalks and heavy flowers belong
in children’s stories, where
gardens bloom in shapes
and colors seldom imagined
 . 
and mushroom grow as big
as houses. With great dark eyes
surrounded by yellow lashes,
they follow the sun on its daily
journey – a bevy of bold young
 . 
girls in love with the same boy.
Dazzling beauties all, showing
up our prim blades of grass
and trimmed bushes like hula
dancers in a room full of pilgrims.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
clouds cast shadows across the ground like whales swimming through clear water
a bevy of bold young girls in love with the same boy [sunflowers]
the yellow-haired girl whose hands rested in her lap like fresh-picked lilies
her fingers dancing over tubes of lipstick as if they were piano keys, and she, learning a new song
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson’s poems delight in the perfect image, the lance of daylight that makes shadows radiant. She populates her lines with characters from every neighborhood and every family, her own included, and she reveals their secrets, unknown sometimes even to them, but she does it with language so airy and effortless that I imagine her raising her pen like a lightning rod and drawing to it from heaven a bright spark of inspiration. Spontaneous, emerging fully formed from the heart. The rest of us bail the bilge as we adhere to the adage, “Writing is re-writing,” while Terri is skipping stones across the water.
 . 
❦
 . 
In the Palms of Angels by Terri Kirby Erickson is available at PRESS 53
More by Terri at Verse & Image HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Grandmother’s Lamp
 . 
In the quiet stillness of a snowy evening,
the earth is white as angel wings and the sky
purple as lilacs pressed against the window
 . 
pane. The soft glow of Grandmother’s lamp,
with its yellowed shade and pattern
of porcelain roses, falls on the antique tabletop
 . 
and the picture of my mother, the ballet
dancer, posing. From the street,
it’s just another lamp in a long row of lighted
 . 
windows, but to me, it is the sweet comfort
of my grandmother’s face, bent earnestly
over her needle point, or patiently putting together
 . 
another scrapbook of memories, pasted just so
on the page. It is her quiet certainty that this, too,
shall pass, that God hears our prayers,
 . 
and the heaven is not the stuff of fairy tales
woven to quiet our fears, but as real as the lamp
she left for me, to light my way there.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from In the Palms of Angels, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2011
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a

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Tether

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on August 23, 2024| 8 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Linda Annas Ferguson]
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Family Reunion
 . 
I have to reach deeper each year
for all that is stored
in the pockets of this house.
 . 
This is a day we have to slow ourselves
to feel what time has deepened.
My own body, half-remembering,
lingers in a doorway.
 . 
Children pick plums
off the near-bare tree
outside the kitchen.
The day dissolves into hungry reaching.
 . 
Mother watches at the window
drinking in the one life she must live,
rolls lint in her apron packet,
suffers love in the smallest of things.
 . 
She is tired now, a fragile cup
to be hummed into.
I can hear a familiar lullaby
in her good-byes.
 . 
We leave all at once
like awkward adolescents
avoiding an intimacy,
Mother’s hands folded on her lap
to fill its emptiness.
 . 
We are already
thinking of tomorrow
as if the past
is just a house we visit.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
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❦ ❦ ❦
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“Hey, Bert, how about if your Mom rides with Aunt Jodi?” We are visiting Linda’s youngest sister in West Virginia, first time since Bert was a toddler. This afternoon he’s been running, toad-hopping, climbing, all out exploring the old house and the new one going up beside it. If there is a tether between him and his mother, it has not been visible. Now we’re preparing to drive to nearby Babcock State Park, but we won’t all fit in one car and there’s just the one car seat, in ours. So how about it, Bert? “No! I want Mommy to ride with me.”
 . 
Perihelion for comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is just weeks away, mid-September 2024; what will happen as it reaches its orbit’s closest point to the sun? How many thousands or millions of years has it been since it last passed this way? It is so small and it will grow so hot, nearer to the sun than Mercury – will it crack like cold glass filled with hot tea? Or will it hold together, swing wide, its long tail swishing across its face to become anti-tail, a leash preceding the body back into darkness and cold? Those who follow the comet don’t see its tether of gravity but they measure its pull and calculate its path, a once in a million years opportunity.
 . 
I haven’t lived in the same home with my mother since June 15, 1974. Even before that there was the year in West Berlin as an exchange student and the three years away at college. Then came fifty years with just a week here and a week there under the same roof, vacations, taking for granted that Mom would still scramble my eggs and make red-eye gravy every morning. And then these last few weeks. Sitting beside her on the couch helping her fill out the Jumble on the comics page. (Me helping her? Inconceivable.) Trying to convince her to eat one more bite of pudding. Bringing fresh flowers from my front yard which never fail to raise a smile. I’ve been saying little goodbyes for months (be honest, for years) and convinced myself I’d laid aside the tether with gentleness and with calm. Perhaps, to be even more honest, I’m only now really feeling its strength.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Mother’s Funeral, the Family Viewing
 . 
You linger in the room, a dark silk.
We sit around in massive silence,
then pleasant and uneasy,
discuss how you willed yourself to die.
 . 
We all saw you going,
never waved to you to come back,
as if we did not think
you would really go.
 . 
Your body lies life-like
as if dreaming motion.
I feel my own aging,
my hands cold like yours.
 . 
I rinse my lips after kissing your cheek
as if death will wash off. I can still see
your closed eyes, your mouth
poised as if forming a thought.
 . 
I turn around, expect you
to be standing in the doorway.
you are not there.
You have finally stopped leaving.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I learned this in grade school: the roots we can’t see are as big as the branches we can. What tethers the tree to earth and nourishes it is so easy to take for granted. Reading Bird Missing from One Shoulder by Linda Annas Ferguson, I imagine her writing these poems twenty years ago and revealing, first for herself and today for me, much that must have once been hidden. Much that must have been difficult to see as it was happening and difficult to return to later. But Linda’s poetry takes nothing for granted. The connections, the ties, the necessary tug and pull of the heart, all are made beautifully plain.
 . 
What is the soil that covers these roots of ours and conceals what should be so plain that we learn it in grade school? Time, of course, saps memory. Yesterday I asked my father about something my mother had told me that I wanted to recall, but it was beyond him. More than time, though, are the curtains we ourselves hang or with which we allow the dailyness of life to cloak us. Some memories are painful; I hold them at bay until the veil frays at 4 AM and they intrude. Some I push aside and promise to deal with later. And some connections, even when truly vital, can’t compete with worrying about the bills and getting to an appointment on time.
 . 
Enter poetry. To write, one must pause at least long enough to pick up a pen. Not that a placid morning free of responsibilities is required – I confess I keep a blank page on a clipboard in the passenger seat beside me and start most of my poems at 65 MPH. The “pause,” though, is metaphor for willingness – to open oneself; to glimpse the unseen; to accept that there are tethers that weave through all of our moments and all of our relationships. Sweet, strong, nourishing roots that hold us down, that hold us up. Love, pervasive and powerful as gravity, swings me every day around the sun.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Mama’s Closet
 . 
I can feel her here under the stairs
where she stores pieces of herself
on shelves in yellowed shoe boxes,
 . 
a report card from fifth grade,
her mother’s signature in faded pencil
on the bottom line.
 . 
A group picture, women workers
outside on the gray grass of the cotton mill,
its tall brick wall the only background,
 . 
her fourteen-year-old face
lost in frowns
and fixed smiles of the front row.
 . 
Another photo at twenty, a Saturday afternoon
on a steel bridge, Daddy’s arm
around her shoulder posed for a future.
 . 
Three purses on ten-penny nails, full of notes,
mementos, money she hides for a child’s needs,
a winter coat, a Sunday dress.
 . 
I can feel her here, under the stairs,
every corner collecting her plain
unperfumed warmth,
 . 
every photo, saving the girls she wants
to remember, every small portion of paper
a folded page of herself.
 . 
Linda Annas Ferguson
from Bird Missing from One Shoulder, WordTech Editions, Cincinnati OH; © 2007
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❦ ❦ ❦
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 4/30/2022

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Treats

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

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[with 3 poems by AE Hines]
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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.
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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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