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Posts Tagged ‘imagery’

Prepare to Meet

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on June 16, 2011| 5 Comments »

Magnificat anima mea Dominum.
Et exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.

You’ve seen signs like the one I’m talking about.  Hand-printed, fervent, a little threatening – probably intentionally so.  You might expect to encounter one only on the winding back lanes a healthy stretch removed from “civilization,” but no, keep your eyes open.  The one I’m thinking of is right on 21 between Roaring Gap and State Road, the heavily traveled route we all take to the Parkway.  Black on white, just a little crude:  “Prepare to Meet Thy God.”

Well, now that’s just silly.  Meet God here?  Not likely, unless He or She knows how to text.  OK, that’s a pretty lame joke.  If God shows up we won’t expect the great I AM to be wearing a robe and speaking Aramaic; if God wants to text me, God certainly will.  No, it’s not technology that’s the barrier, it’s that I am just way too busy to greet God right now.  Aren’t we all?

I guess I thought I was, until I read Rebecca Baggett’s chapbook, God Puts on the Body of a Deer.  Many of the poems are contemplative: they invite me to retreat from the clamor and just ponder for a moment.  But many more plunk me down right in the middle of the incessant mindstream and preoccupation we call “life” and smack me with a sign that seems to say, “Prepare to Meet.”

Not unlike Mary in Annunciation, kneading the dough, hair in her eyes, back aching when . . . suddenly the angel appears, / wingtips quivering, / shimmering like a dragonfly / in the light from one window. // The angel names her, / his voice tender, merciless.  The paradox stops me in my tracks. Tender; merciless.  My God is a being of infinite love and mercy, but wait.  Maybe faith is not a get out of jail free card.  Maybe there’s a reciprocal expectation.  Should I be taking a little more time to listen?  Should I be preparing?

Should I be reading Rebecca’s book more often?

My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

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Annunciation

The girl’s sleeves are rolled
to her elbows, her hands sticky
with dough.  She pushes wisps
of hair from her eyes
with her forearm, yawns,
eases her aching back,
and suddenly the angel appears,
wingtips quivering,
shimmering like a dragonfly
in the light from the one window.

The angel names her,
his voice tender, merciless.
Mary gasps aloud, fingers brushing frantically
at constellations of flour
scattered across her skirt.

There must be some mistake,
she wants to protest, flinching
from the messenger’s luminous face,
his fervent, adoring eyes.
You want some other girl.
Finer.  Kinder to her mother.
Someone stronger, strong enough
to bear . . .

But already she has consented, altered,
speared in a shaft of light,
her breath surging in her ears
while something unearthly
stirs inside her.  Already
the swept dirt floor, the rough-
hewn table, the clay pitcher,
beaded with water-drops,
the new-shaped loaves, still bearing
her hand’s imprint,
have receded,
distinct and distant
as if she had traveled as far
from home as Egypt.  As far as that.

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[from God Puts on the Body of a Deer, Rebecca Baggett, Winner of the 2010 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest]

More poems by Rebecca Baggett

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Traces

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2011| 2 Comments »

Linda’s sister Jodi is a National Park Service ranger in the New River Gorge.  In addition to some of her jobs like cultural and historical interpretation, wildflower walks, and storytelling, she’s also a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School: she teaches people visiting the backcountry to Leave No Trace.

Is it really possible to leave no trace of your passing?  Whether it’s an afternoon in the Greensboro Arboretum or ten days on the AT, can you really return from a place with no evidence you were ever there?  In years past the NPS and other outdoor organizations had less ambitious slogans:  Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires; Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute; Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Footprints; Pack It In, Pack It Out.  But no trace at all?!  Even if all six billion of us recycled, composted, and travelled everywhere we went via shank’s mare, just the act of breathing in and out sends billows of carbon dioxide like a blanket into the atmosphere.  Leave No Trace — are you kidding me?

I wrote this poem, little mouse (trace), with my son and daughter in mind.  At different times one or the other of them has taken extended wilderness treks with me, and we’ve struggled to practice the best stewardship over wild places that we can.  (Margaret’s famous quotation upon reaching a road crossing with a refuse bin and over a pound of garbage in her pack:  “Trash cans rock my world!”)  But the world I want to leave them is not one with a few nice paths through the woods free of candy wrappers.  It’s not just the expectation that a few hikers will know how to erase the marks of their stay when they break camp.  It’s more like some crazy hope that all of us, every one, will retain an acute awareness of our traces right in the very places where we live.  That we’ll regret the unavoidable scars we leave on the earth.  That we’ll celebrate together when we can heal one.

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little mouse
(trace)

I want to leave the earth and climb
the snowbank cumulus, kick
my boots into the billow, lean
against my sassafras stick and rise.
Rain licks the slickrock clean

of my prints, greenbriar weaves
wild drapery up the wall, hickory sprouts
through the sidewalk.  I want to leave
no trace of my passing, no more trail
than the cursive of a slender tail

in dew.  Morning sun drinks that cup
and learns a word I never spoke,
someone’s new word for love.  I
want to be no more I but we – creature
loam bud feather; let roots translate

the phosphorus of my dust to fruit.
If you look for me a wren calls.
If you listen the poplar turns to honey
in the sky.  Drink deep this cup.  I want
to leave the earth to you.

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[from little mouse, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2011]

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Home in What We Hope to Find

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on May 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ve made a whole lot of bird lists over the past twenty years. (Made a BIG one yesterday – see the post in a couple of days.)  I’ve got lists for my yard, my neighborhood, for Elkin and Surry County, for Pine Knoll Shores, for NC and a bunch of other states, and then of course the master list, the “life” list.  I’ve even gone on a couple of organized trips where a guide would point to the bird and tell you what it was — then you add it to another list.  And check it off in your database when you get home.

But among all those lists, among the thousands of data points, for some reason there are some individual birds I never forget.  My first Northern Parula – right here in my own backyard, but I waited almost an hour for it to show itself at the tip of the big white oak.  The Black-Throated Blue Warbler Mary Ellen and I spotted near Muskrat Creek Shelter on the AT, our last evening together on the trail.  The Common Yellowthroat Nancy and I stalked through briars so she could see her first one.  On and on.  I’m thankful for each creature’s tiny jewelled body.  I’m thankful they decided not to conceal themselves forever.

The birds I added to my list during organized trips are just not as memorable as the others (well, maybe the Harlequin Duck bobbing in the surf at the pier in Rodanthe . . .).  Am I saying that we treasure most those things we have to work for?  Good Puritan ethic! But that’s not exactly it; I guess I would rather say we treasure those things we discover for ourselves.  The branches are full of warblers – will I raise my eyes and look?

This is the closing section of my poem Leave and Come Home.  My journey as father is about to enter unmapped territory – the mountains and coves of grandfather.  Warblers are returning from their wintering grounds to make a new home.  How have they found their way?  How will Josh and I find ours?  Some vast unseen magnetism compels us.  Perhaps home has always been, although unnamed and so often unseen, that inner will to discover.  Maybe home is always that very thing we hope to find.


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Leave and Come Home
Backyard, Elkin, North Carolina

Which one is home: what I know and leave behind
or what I have yet to reach?
May 1st storms all day and night but this bright morning
frees the migrants from their cover – tree limbs fill
with warblers.  In an hour they’ll resume their passage north,
but for now they’re willing to reveal themselves
if we have the will to notice.

In a few days Josh will become a father. I watch
the corner of his mouth for a hint of one laconic smile . . .
there it is!  He follows a trail of a hundred steps to assemble
my grandson’s crib. Outside the back window
Cardinals jostle at the feeder and

among the poplar blossoms warblers ruffle droplets
from their wings, show off their woodland jewelry,
glean aphids from beech twigs.  In the spotlight
Black-Sided Blue preens in formal dress, then flies.
And does he dream of the feast of insects
at his Costa Rican winter grounds or of the nest
he’ll build at Clingman’s Dome?  Or is it simply
some vast unseen magnetism, cycle of sun and
circling stars that speak to him to reveal
his home?  Point to it, Mom.  Or leave
me to discover it myself – home may yet abide
in what we hope to find.

Tomorrow I will lean into that crib compelled
by stars and magnetism, leave for later the unnameable
complexity of color, shape, song, that unspoken
trail that twists between son and father:
into that soft pink ear, I’ll whisper Redbird.

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[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society.  In four sections, it reflects some fifty years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family.  I posted section 1 on 5/8, section 2 on 5/15, and 3 on 5/22.  This is the fourth and final section.]

 

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