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Posts Tagged ‘imagery’

Beast & Innocent – Diana Pinckney

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Diana Pinckney, FutureCycle Press, imagery, nature, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, tadpole on March 26, 2021| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Diana Pinckney]

No hesitation. Out the back door she takes my hand and we hike down through the woods, steep switching trail, slick moss rocks, sliding on last fall’s leaves. Big brother is not with us today; she is the explorer. I wonder if she’ll hold back at the wash but she hops rocks across the rivulet and even runs ahead of me along Dutchman Creek. Threading the briers, skirting mud, twigs in her hair – she is all go today.

When we reach our destination, the shallow pools that linger from winter floods and may be dry by August, I hesitate. Not so many months ago she would make me check the playroom floor for millipedes, back away from pillbugs on the porch steps, want to be carried to the car.

I squat in a squishy place beside the water and show her clumps of clear jelly. Most of the eggs have hatched, some larvae still in their shivery globes, many tadpoles swimming free. With one finger I push algae aside so she can see them wriggle. Instantly her fingers are in the water, too. Tickling the tiny black wigglers. Oblivious to muck and slime. Pappy, can we come back here tomorrow?

This is what I would wish for her at five and all her life – to be innocent and yet be bold. To face the new and the scary and not look away. To discover, to wonder. And to remember the immense power of NO! bursting from her body, now when her brother thwarts her playful imaginings and always when the world conspires to steal that innocence from her.

And, for as long as I’m able, I wish for her to still want me to carry her.

. . . . . . .

Who is completely innocent and who is entirely beast? Diana Pinckney’s poems are subtle like a rustle in the night but lucid, windows breathing light and fragrance into the world. Her language and lines are effortlessly elegant. Her poems seem to arrive from all the points of the compass to create community: persona poems in which the reader comes to inhabit a new being; poems of family, loss, commemoration, revelation; ekphrastic poems that uncover hidden truth in painting, sculpture, representation.

And woven throughout her book, The Beast and the Innocent, lurks the wolf: tyrant predator, misunderstood victim; purity and profane. Who is the threat and who the threatened? Aren’t we all only doing what it takes to survive?

. . . . . . .

Ghost Wolves, for My Grandchildren

You may see one in a zoo
***** and ask, does he howl
********** and I may say, what would

he howl about? What, you ask, does a wild
***** wolf sound like? What could I answer? Wind
********** when it rises from the deepest

canyon to the tops of spruce
***** or the fog’s blue surge, the drift
********** above dying embers. Smoke alone

moves toward the stars in a world
***** where nothing is heard and only the moon
********** knows then the last tree falls.

Emptiness that whispers
***** after the wilderness
********** has forgotten what it longs for.

. . . . . . .

My Brother Sings
after Raymond Carver’s “What the Doctor Said”

He sings when the dogwoods are blooming as I drive
him and his wife along the highway from Asheville,
away from a hospital where we waited in the doctor’s office,
sitting in gray chairs, joking about my allergy

to their six cats, ow I can’t sleep in their house
and still breathe. I watched my brother move
his fingers over swollen knuckles that he used to
crack when I was little just to tease. There to hear

the results of the lung biopsy, now we know.
Traveling through Blue Ridge mountains, we see
dogwoods, redbuds, cherry trees heavy
with April’s abundance. When my brother

begins the song, his wife in the back seat on her cell
interrupts, Dabney, will you please stop singing
while I’m telling Sis you have cancer. Oh, sorry, he says.
He glances at me while petals drift with us

down the mountain. Our laughter’s almost soundless.

. . . . . . .

The Beast and The Innocent

Of course, dogs and cats go to heaven,
my mother announce from her deathbed.
Welcomed into heaven, my childhood cat
will groom Grandmother’s canary, feathers the same
yellow as the black cat’s eyes, the bird

he ate when I was seven. In paradise
pointers lap at duck ponds while cockatiels
screech and perch on each dog’s white- or black-
spotted back. Heaven’s way is,

as we have heard, the lion lying down
with the lamb. A place where Christians kindle
the eight candles of Hanukkah, Muslims unfurl
prayer rugs for Hindi, and the roped Tibetan prayer

flags flutter good fortune for the Chinese.
The wine and wafer bless a round wooden table, a feast
celebrated with unleavened and leavened,
mango and oyster, babel unlimited. And the spaniel
that killed my brother’s rabbits will lie

on the wide-bladed grass of my youth, all manner
of four- and two-legged creatures leaping
over him, some stroking the red-and-white silk
of his fur for pure pleasure, for the grace.

. . . . . . .

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Darkness into Light – Tony Abbott

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Anthony S. Abbott, Bill Griffin, Bill Griffin Photography, imagery, poetry, Southern Poetry, Southern writing, Tony Abbott on March 19, 2021| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Tony Abbott]

. . . each morning as a wrapped gift.

We parried, a friendly joust, this poet I knew who anchored his lance upon all poetry is about love. Later I would think how odd, a paradox in fact: this person seems to thrive on hate and even infected me for a time. Even later I read more of his poetry and reconsidered: perhaps hate is simply the anger and loss that bleed from us, caustic, when love is too distant, too longed for, too impossible.

But during our little tournament I countered with this novel thrust: all poetry is about death. You don’t, I asked him, believe the immortals on Olympus write poetry, do you? With no death to undergird, to prod, to threaten, without death they have no muse. They must rely on us mere humans to wrench and wrest verse from the earth of our dark condition.

How odd, a paradox in fact: I don’t think anyone would consider me the moody type. I don’t ruminate on death – or do I? The loved one whose problem seems to have no solution; the 4 a.m. wakefulness when all mistakes made and all hurts caused crowd around the bed with their sharpened sticks; the bitterness of an imagined future when I will not be there for my granddaughter, my grandsons – why do I invite such overshadowing darkness into my heart?

What might cleave the darkness, fill it with light? How is it possible, which indeed it is, that every one of us may discover some joy in a fragrant afternoon, a laughing child, a lingering kiss without inevitably asking what if this is the last?

. . . . . . .

the moment which gives to all life / the aura of the mysterious, the sacred . . .

How does the man facing darkness bestow such light on all around him? I believe these poems by Tony Abbott. I believe the voices that have spoken to him and his voice that still speaks to us. That speaks of darkness becoming light.

During the last year of his life Tony treasured moments. He captured luminous moments and has held them up for us, to turn this way and that, to peer and to ponder, to treasure along with him and let in the light. A wrapped gift is one that must be opened to be loved. Light is something to be entered with regrets laid to rest.

. . . . . . .

The Man Who Loved Trees

kept his distance this year as if he knew,
as if the dark possibility which haunted
his inner mind could only be kept at bay
by stark denial, a looking the other way.

And then one day, he forgot, and found
himself there at the very spot, and when
he finally brought his eyes up from the brick
walk to the tree itself, he knew he was right.

She was ordinary now, leaves still intact
but mustard brown and dry, dry as the dust
which had choked the air that fall, dry as his
own heart, which had slowed to a walk.

If you don’t wake her, he thought, the muse
goes back to sleep, malnourished, the roots die.

. . . . . . .

That Without Which

The moment itself not being but coming into
or having been the moment itself that which
we wait for live for then like the five o’clock
winter sun fading into a rustle, a blowing
of the window curtains door to the balcony
open to the wind the walking on the beach
the stars the ringing of the communion bell
and the knowledge priceless that this might
have never been could never be but was
and is the moment which gives to all life
the aura of the mysterious, the sacred,
blessed and consecrated by the heart under
another name not known but felt how could
we live otherwise

. . . . . . .

The Last

The last walk, he thinks, the last stroll
down the wooded path with the dog
sniffing in the cool morning air.

The last knock on the red door.

The last subway ride – New York,
London, Paris. The ungovernable
steps. The violins at the Louvre.

The last sigh under the stone stairs.

Better not to know. Tomorrow
or ten years. Better to receive
each morning as a wrapped gift.

The last glimpse of the crescent moon at midnight.

The last swim in the smooth lake,
the last flash of the sun
as it sinks into the sea.

The last wave reaching high and sliding back.

The last poem, the last linking
of lines, nothing more to be said
anyway – the last silence between words.

The last of the lasts that have already been.

The last kiss, the last touch, the last
image of arms at midnight
the last breath before

the last.

. . . . . . .

Thank you, Tony, always. We do continue trying, and we will not stop trying, to make something beautiful from the brokenness that we are. Together. May it be and become so.

. . . . . . .

The North Carolina Poetry Society has honored Anthony S. Abbott’s memory and shared Tony’s poetry at its January, 2021 literary meeting and with a commemoration in the Winter, 2021 edition of its quarterly publication, Pine Whispers.

Better to receive / each morning as a wrapped gift.
– The Last

the moment which gives to all life / the aura of the mysterious, the sacred . . .
– That Without Which

Links to biographies and more information about Tony Abbott and his work.

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After

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Denton Loving, imagery, pandemic, poetry, Southern writing on March 5, 2021| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Denton Loving]

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy”

Tomorrow we are driving to Raleigh to see our 3-year old grandson Bert. In person! In the two months since our last in person we’ve visited at least once a week on FaceTime or extended-family Zoom sessions. Often he’s in the bath (easier to keep him in one place); he always wants to show us a toy or especially some of his many books; at least once he’s seen a toy in our background and asked to play with it.

Bert is excited to see us on the little screen but our daughter Margaret tells us that almost every day he asks, “Where’s Granny and Pappy?”

Life is busy happening to us while we’re not able to make hardly any plans at all. Where are we indeed!? All of us are no doubt in the same place: spending a lot of time thinking of things we can’t wait to start doing again when the pandemic has subsided (although it’s time for all of us who’ve learned the definition of pandemic to open the dictionary to endemic). Things to do after – you know you have a list. I’ll bet you’ve even been writing them down.

Herewith I’m starting a list of things I hope to be when the seasons of fear and loss and paranoia are past. If there has been any nano-benefit of living through a pandemic, it might be that I’ve started becoming some of these things already:

Open – to what other people need, to what they’re feeling, less fixated on self
Grateful – for the little things and what now seem like really big things, especially time spent with people I love
Aware of daily changes – in nature, in me and my family, present to the passage of time
Hopeful – life will never be the same, but then again what person actually has stepped into the same river twice? I’m glad I get to keep stepping in every day anew.

. . . . . . .

Denton Loving’s book Crimes Against Birds has been sitting beside my desk for a good while – face down because Linda is creeped out by the cover. I am so glad I’ve kept returning to it. These poems have become my pandemic companions. It’s not only because of their intimate relationship with nature, outdoors, farm life. The poems are like rocking on the porch while the sun sets across the mountains and your companions are uncertainty, death, regret, loss, but also beauty and hope – you welcome them all, invite them to sit down and tell their stories while you get to know them. There is comfort and consolation in facing what has to be faced, and as you do the moon rises through the trees.

. . . . . . .

What Was Told
(after Rumi)

What was said to the canna lily to make it
open was said here in my heart. What was
told the sycamore that made its wood hard
and bone white; what was whispered
to the storm’s wind to make it what it is;
what made the honeysuckle smell so sweet
in summer; whatever seed was planted
in the core of the mountain
people to make them love
so deeply, fiercely, beautifully;
whatever gives the catawba the pink inside
the white blooms – that is being said to me
now. I blush like the catawba’s flower.
Whatever gave life to letters and words
is happening here. The great sanctuary
within me has opened its doors; I fill
with thanksgiving as I savor the sweet
taste of honeysuckle on my lips, in love
with the voice that speaks also to me.

. . . . . . .

My Father Leaves Harlan on 119

He remembered
when they started the first
eight miles of this new road
from Pineville to Harlan:
it was 1958.
They had closed
the mines. You couldn’t buy
a job anywhere.

Wilse and Stan and I
were on our way to Corbin
to put in applications – I
can’t remember where now.
Was so long ago.
They didn’t take Stan’s
or mine, and they never did call
Wilse back.

We were hungry
and stopped at Grandma’s
in Barbourville.
We came in the noon
of the day. I don’t think
she was too happy to see us
right in the middle of her work
but she fed us good.
Always did.

She’s been deal all these years
and here I am
Still driving
up this new road.

. . . . . . .

Your Very Flesh

I knew a woman who made fudge as thick
and smooth as summer and five times better
than any you ever ate. It’s an art

to make anything that melts on your tongue,
can be savored down deep in your soul. Makes
me want to know how to do it too. Do you

know how to do something that brings simple
joy in its beauty, will be remembered
after you die? Every July, my Nana

made fourteen-day pickles. For days, she soaked
cucumbers in salt water, removed to
cut in perfect slices, submerged again,

drained them and covered them, added alum,
added sweetness, drained and boiled the syrup,
covered again, dedicated fourteen days

to create something in the end that looked too
pretty to eat. But we did anyway. Now, she
is gone, and none of the rest of us will give

fourteen days to the drudgery of pickles.
I’m not only talking food. I know a man
who can quote lines from the classics to suit

any occasion. His gift is not just memory
but also timing and recitation. He’s a walking
anthology of lost verses, forgotten lines.

This same man cuts and sells timber, and I’ve
heard said there’s no one better to use every
inch of wood a tree can yield. There’s no waste

in his bones. Another art. And I bet
when this man stands in the woods with his saw
in hand, he pauses and gives a little

eulogy for the tree he’s ready
to bring down. May, a word from Plato
or john Donne, or this from Whitman:

your very flesh shall be a great poem.

. . . . . . .

The quotation from John Lennon’s song, “Beautiful Boy,” has also been attributed to cartoonist Allen Saunders in 1957: Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

When we meet with Margaret, Josh, and Bert in person we sit around in the backyard in Raleigh, masked if we’re less than 6 feet apart, but we’re allowed to get knee hugs from Bert. The chickens peck around us and garble and coo; Bert runs everywhere and shows us everything; maybe Josh has heated the wood-fired bread oven and makes pizza. If it’s too cold we have to get up and keep moving, maybe walk the Crabtree Creek Greenway. More than once it’s been too too cold and wet and we’ve just had to cancel the visit. But it will never be too cold After.

More about DENTON LOVING, his writing, himself: https://dentonlovingblog.wordpress.com/

. . . . . . .