V E R S E and I M A G E

[ two poems by Betty Adcock]
 . 

++++ for Gerald Barrax

Far west of this late afternoon,

mountains I’ve never seen search California’s

sky for snowdrifts. I can only guess

at shapes of trees and flowers

born of such high thrift.

On the flats below, nothing greens.

++++++++++++It is a word for thirst.

In my country, small birds are surging

into October. They gather at dusk,

their pillar of smoke swirling

over the dead chimney,

a dream getting ready to dive,

the fire going backward.

++++++++It is a word for visible wind.

Imagine the lives of such words.

Subtle as the interiors of antique jars,

they shape their enclosed dark

because we hold them to be;

and name after name, they give us the many.

If we should break the clay,

as we can, able to do anything,

believing as we do in no vessel,

believing in fragments, in nothing –

night would step out, the old

wild messenger

bearing the same steep shade,

the same configurations of black wings.

Whatever we hoped to say,

it was there all the time.

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Horizontal in my green coat,

resting my head on a log, I must have seemed

some part of autumn that refused to turn,

under the flicker’s scissoring and squirrel’s

scribble against an iron sky.

And this is a simple story. Let loose

it will run by itself to the place

where blanched sun laced through near-bare branches

and the day seemed to pour from the hawk’s gyre.

To doze in the woods is to rest on the hard edge

of fear, so you’re awake

to what you can neither see nor dream

nor come at with a name.

And yet I thought at first of hikers

in that crash of leaves, a sound that dimmed

at the edges then came back all wrong

because there was no order in it,

no human rhythm.

I did not quite cry out but froze the moment

I saw him see me, saw the heavy-antlered head

alter its slant.

He moved in the slow way animals will seem

to move in children’s picture books,

on each page larger, clearer –

until he was so close I saw the shine

on raised black nostrils,

and I though stupidly of creeks,

how they go black with mystery

underneath the winter’s lens of ice.

Browsing the leaf-quilted floor, huffing,

the deer edged closer, stopped, his eyes on mine;

and the moment went sly as a dream, the world

unhinged a little, light with reckoning and change.

But there was no revelation. None.

No help for the poet’s old protean

longing to become, to be undone.

Whole minutes – two? three? A look, a tangle

of otherness tight as bramble, odd

as a long fall. Noting

had ever happened or ever would

while I could hear that stranger-breath and see

each separate shoulder-hair shift color as he blew

a snort like a horse’s. How exact the hoof’s design

on fallen leaves, lifting and setting down

with such small sound I might be still alone.

And someone now is saying this is one of those

dense and symbol-laden moments poets make

to force and tease, the whole thing false

with sexual curvature and hidden weight.

This could be the father coming back

in the form he killed. Or the father’s

nemesis. Or it could be a sweet communion,

that old lie.

Finally huge and motionless as a tree

and nearer than my senses wished to know,

he took on, like a cloak, the simple dusk.

And if that looks like poetry, like loss,

the shadow of loss, or memory like black water

on his sides, the let it be

these words as good as any.

++++++++++++++++++++He leapt straight up

as if to lose that covering thought.

He turned and caught

the barest gilding of last light

and stirred the leaves to sharp explosion

and was gone. A distant brushy rustle.

It took me longer to begin to leave.

Some tears shook from me without regret or reason,

a kind of backward praise. For what,

I neither know nor quite forget.

from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001. First published in The Difficult Wheel (1995).

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Betty Adcock was six years old when her mother died. Could losing your entire world at such an age cause you to hold more fiercely and deeply to your new world through all the days that follow? Her poetry pierces me with the painful acuity of its remembering, its seeking, its discovering. There is always another question, another quest. She never arrives at a comfortable shore.

Betty often uses tangible artifacts as anchors for her narrative – an old photo of her on the day of her mother’s funeral, her father’s wood carvings that she must clear from his old roll-top desk after his death. The artifact, however, is servant to her imagery, which wrenches and lofts and growls in the throes of imagination. Today I helped my father set up a little Christmas tree in his nursing home room. When I cleaned out his attic last year, I selected from within his and Mom’s many boxes of Christmas decorations a shoebox full – less breakable, more memorable. As we pulled them out and placed them on the tree today, I imagined where they may have come from, why this or that one in particular might have been chosen or crafted or purchased.

Dad barely commented to see most of the ornaments; their stories are beyond him now. Loss and diminishment is the story I was prepared to bring home with me. But in the bottom of the box I found two angel silhouettes cut from cardboard, hand decorated with glitter. Dad chuckled when I turned them over to show their clothes pin hangers and names in pencil, “Bobby G.” on one and the other “Billy.” As I was leaving, Dad gazing rapt at the handsome tree, he turned and said, “Thank you for bringing this to me.” Loss, diminishment, preservation, memory. Joy?

❀

Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)

Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.

Additional poetry by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image — 

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