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Monsters

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Cervena Barva Press, David Radavich, family, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on January 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

[with 3 poems by David Radavich]

Offering

From one day

to the next

seems a difference

between drought

and flood,

corporations

and the poor.

Should we pack

our suitcase

for the future?

We bend over

gardenias

in the back yard,

salvia, rosemary,

daylilies jut now

blazing

wondering if nature

can withstand

our age,

sun fighting

with wind and rain,

wars consuming

everything

we believe.

Time to visit

the cemetery, bring

the pure lilies

we picked

this morning

as our offering

to the dead,

We owe them

our knees

and this stab at

continuing

paying homage

to names

and all

that’s green.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

“These are monsters migrating.” Thus the boy explains the drawing he’s brought home from kindergarten. Three big ones fly south, dragon-winged, pterodactylloid, gallinaceous. A mighty bruiser gallops on great feet bound to raise dust and thunder, heavy tail thrashing. But here’s one down in the corner foreground, not imposing, non-scary, looking me straight in the eye. Most monsters speed away, thank goodness, but some are willing to stay and make friends.

Monsters sneak into my head at 3 AM when I return from the bathroom. In the old days, before I retired from medicine, they called me from the ICU or Labor & Delivery and I knew it was time to pull up my pants and find the car keys. Now they spring up when I call them – damn! – and poke me with their spines and cold stiff claws each time my breath attempts to settle. Does anyone escape? Doesn’t everyone with parent, child, grandchild harbor a squirm of worry underneath the bed, ready to pop awake and crawl up between the sheets?

Monsters seem to be drawn to the idle mind like migrating bats to open, dark caverns. Their scales and markings may vary but they all belong to Class, Order, and Family of What If? Once their migration might have lasted just hours – what if I can’t get his blood pressure up? what if her baby’s head is transverse? – but now they don’t seem to have any finite lifespan. The infinite multiverse fans out from its monstrous 3 AM nidus into a crashing storm of uncertainty. Calm yourself. Smooth those waves of rapid breathing. Wrap the turbulence and darkness until they become a comforting cloak. What . . .

. . . if you sit down with me here and tell me about these monsters? The boy has a name for each one. He knows their powers and their weaknesses. Far from being fearful, these are friends, some to each other and all of them to him. You wouldn’t want to sit on one – they’re sharp, and they might break! – but it’s amazing to watch them fly and run. In fact, they are all related to each other. They are monster family.

❦ ❦ ❦

Crux

for Shelby

This is where

boy meets man:

a space

always alone

between

water and land,

fishing

or hiking,

gathering crayfish,

skipping stones,

another boss

is another tyrant,

pay not enough

to make ends meet,

mouths to feed

at the table,

gills in the water

needing your lure

and just the right

throw to home

sliding in

or head-long,

swinging high over

that creek

never knowing

if the vine will hold,

that’s what being

adult means:

learning

not to trust,

pulling everything

you’ve got,

keeping a sharp eye on

what’s moving

and then

grab it for grace,

feed that family

and don’t apologize.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

What if my name, instead of “Bill,” were “Boy?” What is the thing against the idea of the thing? And words on a page, are they the one or are they the other? David Radavich, in Here’s Plenty, doesn’t open his palm and hold out to you the answer to such queries, but he leaves plenty of answers scattered among the lilies or still hanging from branches, reddening fruit for us readers to discover. Can the idea of a thing become itself when we bite into it, when we take it into ourselves?

This is one task and one blessing of poetry – not to be a textbook, lining out chapter and verse; not to be gospel; but to be spell, cast into the world and opening like the petalled layers of a peony. Perhaps we return day by day to discover its transformation, perhaps we grab and thrust our nose deep into the blossom’s perfume and scatter petals all around us. Either way we engage, yes with the words but even more so with ourselves. The real poetry is what we write within while reading what is without.

David Radavich lives in the world. So apples, seed and stem, peel and core and crisp. Edens and crags. Harsh sharp divisions and tender comings together. Nothing ignored or unnoticed, nothing left out. Everything invited in. You and me, too. Come – there’s plenty.

❦

Here’s Plenty is David Radavich’s tenth collection of poetry. He has also published many plays as well as scholarly and informal essays in many countries. The book is available HERE

❦ ❦ ❦

Going Home

Forget about it.

The old one wasn’t

worth much

anyway.

You can do better

tossing a coin

or consulting

some astrologer.

Choose

where or what

you want to be

and go there

to take your place

among the yet

to arrive.

Wave your white

flag to the past

and make your new

garden bloom

as if

you had been

there all along

incognito

among many

creatures

you don’t know

names for,

your enemies

forgotten

and a sky

just as much

your own

as a new skin.

David Radavich

❦ ❦ ❦

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Foreshadowing

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged Adrienne Rich, Bill Griffin, Ecopoetry, Ecopoetry Anthology, Evie Shockley, Foreshadowing, Gary Snyder, imagery, nature, nature poetry, New Year, poetry on December 29, 2023| 9 Comments »

[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by

Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

Gary Snyder

❦ ❦ ❦

In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.

Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.

Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.

Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?

Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!

❦ ❦ ❦

notes for the early journey

+++ for j.v.k.

somewhere along the way you will need to lean

over a bluff’s edge drop you shoes and keep moving use

the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide if a

rainbow confuses you which end go the third

way on the mountain you’ll remember climb on

up to where the aspens tremble you will be alone these

high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags but for you

there’s nothing to worry about breathe sniff the air like

a bloodhound and head the opposite way find the

place where the land dissolves into sand keep walking when

that sand becomes sea speak a bridge into being

I know you can do it your father’s son ain’t

heard of can’t follow the song don’t stop until you’re south

of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine I never

once stumbled on such a place hard to say if a brown child

is the last four hundred years has had such

a luscious dream day or night but this is your mother’s

lullaby I know she meant you to sleep sweet

Evie Shockley

❦ ❦ ❦

At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.

This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words, but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.

And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!

❦

More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order, HERE

. .

❦ ❦ ❦

What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t

+++ be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light –

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich

❦ ❦ ❦

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Immanence

Posted in Christian themes, family, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Christmas, Different Hours, imagery, James Webb Space Telescope, JSWT, nature photography, poetry, Process Theology, Stephen Dunn on December 22, 2023| 15 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Stephen Dunn]

Returning from an Artist’s Studio

Late at night in my one life

I see fireflies scintillating a field

and a fullish moon up there working

on its reputation, which I thought

was secure. And though I’m not one

to stop my car for beauty

I stop, get out, begin to understand

how the first stories winked

of another world. It’s as if

I’m witness to some quiet carnival

of the gods, or the unrisen dead

speaking in code.

Insects are eating each other. Stunned

beyond fear, mice are being given

their first and last flights,

talons holding them dear.

The fox has found a warren.

Everything I can’t see

is at least as real as what I can.

If I stand here long enough

I’ll hear a bark and a squeal.

The artist had an eye for exaggerated sunsets

splashed with rain, odd collisions

of roots, animals, seeds.

I didn’t like a thing I saw,

so much effort to be strange.

The moon is hanging from a leafy branch.

The fireflies are libidinous

and will not be denied.

Stephen Dunn

❦ ❦ ❦

Its birthday is three days from now: Monday, December 25. It will be two years old. Call it, perhaps, a mote which from where we stand is invisible. Or better, call it an eye, one that sees into almost everything. Best of all, in this season of visionaries who seek truth and meaning as they follow stars, call this a new-born star. There it glints, locked in thrall of its own near infinitely larger star, to which it turns its back and pays no attention at all.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on December 25, 2021. Within a few weeks it maneuvered into its orbit around the Sun, 1.5 million km from Earth, and unfolded its mirror of bright hexagons, gold-plated beryllium, the ommatidia of its compound eye. It sees the light of galaxies emitted 13.1 billion years in the past (13.1 billion light-years distant). It is already shattering theories about the earliest times of our universe’s creation. Primordial black holes, early giant stars, galaxy clusters – is this inconceivable vastness really the Universe of which our own little planet is the center?

We choose December 25 to celebrate the birthday of a human being who represents God’s tangible presence here on earth. Immanuel, God-with-us. Jesus, in halo orbit around the Lagrange point of God’s gravitational unity – in the phraseology of Process Theology, “perfectly synchronized to God at all moments of life”; “fully and in every way responsive to God’s call.” This is how I yearn to experience my God – fully present in the wild aster seeds I gathered and sowed yesterday, and equally present throughout a universe spanning some 10*30 cubic light years. If the JWST reveals more wonders and marvels than I could ever dream, do I deny the nature of reality or shall I enlarge my notion of God?

Here’s my mission this Christmas season. First, to shift myself off center. As much as I’m able, to remember that the Universe does not really revolve around me; to open myself to the persuasive power of love pushing me to its Lagrange point. Second, to unfold my compound eye. To look out as far as it takes, and as deep within, to discover God in constant process of moving and becoming. And at the same time to discover what it is that I am called to become.

❦ ❦ ❦

Before the Sky Darkens

Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus

of melancholy – maybe these are

the Saturday night-events

to take your best girl to. At least then

there might be moments of vanishing beauty

before the sky darkens,

and the expectation of happiness

would hardly exist

and therefore might be possible.

More and more you learn to live

with the unacceptable.

You sense the ever-hidden God

retreating even farther,

terrified or embarrassed.

You might as well be a clown,

big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.

That’s how you feel, say, on a Tuesday.

Then out of the daily wreckage

comes an invitation

with your name on it. Or more likely,

that best girl of yours offers you,

once again, a small local kindness.

You open your windows to good air

blowing in from who knows where,

which you gulp and deeply inhale

as if you have a death sentence. You have.

All your life, it seems, you’ve been appealing it.

Night sweats and useless strategem. Reprieves.

Stephen Dunn

❦ ❦ ❦

So many bookcases. In this house are many mansions. A few days ago, on one of the less accessible shelves, I noticed a book I hadn’t opened in years. I couldn’t recall the specifics of the poems it contains but just looking at its cover recalled emotions from when I last read it: warmth, questioning, surprise, discovery, assurance that this process of living is valid, valuable, and even in its fearfulness to be cherished. Then I opened Stephen Dunn’s Different Hours and found this:

Twenty-three Christmases ago. I wonder how my parents selected this particular book for me? It had just been published but I don’t imagine it greeting folks boisterously as they entered the door at Barnes & Noble. Did Mom and Dad realize the book would win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry? As well as I can recall, the only other book of poetry they every bought me was Maya Angelou. And then there’s the inscription, from “Dad and Mom,” although this is certainly my mother’s handwriting, still elegant and strong at the beginning of the century.

All these questions. In spite of them, I see that it was the perfect book for me then and that this is the perfect week to rediscover it. Stephen Dunn explores love, its foolishness and its bedrock. He explores death, of those people and things we love and our own racing toward us. And within the “different hours” of doubt and questioning, of emptiness and aimlessness, he hints at hope and wonder within this elusive reality we occupy.

After Christmas, as new books heap themselves on my desk, I’ll return this one to its safe berth. Whenever I next happen to chance upon it, I know it will again be the perfect time.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Metaphysicians of South Jersey

Because in large cities the famous truths

already had been plumbed and debated,

the metaphysicians of South Jersey lowered

their gaze, just tried to be themselves.

They’d gather at coffee shops in Vineland

and deserted shacks deep in the Pine Barrens.

Nothing they came up with mattered

so they were free to be eclectic, and as odd

as getting to the heart of things demanded.

They walked undisguised on the boardwalk.

At the Hamilton Mall they blended

with the bargain-hunters and the feckless.

Almost everything amazed them,

the last hour of a county fair,

blueberry fields covered with mist.

They sought the approximate weight of sadness,

its measure and coloration. But they liked

a good ball game too, well pitched, lots of zeroes

on the scoreboard. At night when they lay down,

exhausted and enthralled, their spouses knew

it was too soon to ask any hard questions.

Come breakfast, as always, the metaphysicians

would begin to list the many small things

they’d observed and thought, unable to stop talking

about this place and what a world it was.

Stephen Dunn

❦ ❦ ❦

The James Webb Space Telescope is located near (in a “halo orbit” that keeps it in the vicinity of) the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange Point. A Lagrange Point is an area of gravitational equilibrium in relationship to two massive bodies: Sun-Earth, Earth-Moon, etc. Positioning JWST in this way requires less energy to maintain and allows a longer functional lifespan.

More about the James Webb Space Telescope, and some literally awesome photographs, HERE

More about Process Theology, which states that each instant of Being is ever in the process of Becoming, HERE

Stephen Dunn (1939-2021) as described by The Poetry Foundation: Dunn’s poetry reflects the social, cultural, psychological, and philosophical territory of the American middle class; his intelligent, lyrical poems narrate the regular episodes of an everyman speaker’s growth, both as an individual and as part of a married—and later divorced—couple. His poetry is concerned with the anxieties, fears, joys, and problems of how to coexist in the world with all those who are part of our daily lives.