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Posts Tagged ‘Jacar Press’

Spring. Whatever.

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2025| 2 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]
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Turbulence
 . 
Of the stomach lifting. Of the weightless
where I was and am again variety.
 . 
Sway and crack, our craft. Slalom
the wind. So much carbon in the currents.
 . 
Of the climate kind. Of the jerk and twack.
Of the hurtling toward. Shake right out
 . 
of our human. As if we might not
settle back into these bodies,
 . 
but land instead in someone else.
Yet the hare far below isn’t empty
 . 
to receive us. Neither is the horse.
They have their own embodied plans.
 . 
We will have to settle beside ourselves
Blurred boundaries and all. Bump,
 . 
rattle, and creak. Our enlightened selves
grasp cokes, play solitaire, read, sleep,
 . 
going on as if what’s happening isn’t.
With more than prayers
 . 
holding us up, we are nonetheless
tossed in the vastness.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
ah spring spring 
how great is spring! 
and so on 
Bashō (1644-1694)
 . 
Basho has perfectly snared my mood this morning. I am reading Spring haiku at SeasonWords.com: Ah, Winter vanquished!, Ah, new life!, blah, blah, blah. I am not feeling newly lively these days, especially not as the sun so gaily rises. By day I seem to be the rock between two storms, my father and my son, but by 4 AM I have eroded to sand and the bed is far too gritty for sleep. Now this haiku blog offers a prompt for the season and encourages sharing? Here are my Spring lines:
 . 
what to say
when everyone’s “spring, spring” –
toads trilling
 . 
In her book Haiku and Senryu: A Simple Guide for All, Charlotte Digregorio states, Wherever one lives, one experiences changing seasons. The haiku’s brief flash illuminates one specific moment. We read the terse lines and might recognize where we are, but certainly, and more critically, we do know precisely when we are. Perhaps we have never shared the haiku’s circumscribed space, but we do share the time of pollen, the humidity, crisp crackling leaves, the shivers. A moment’s experience broadens into a communal truth.
 . 
In that sense, haiku becomes less an instruction in encountering nature and more an invitation to shared humanity. Besides the experience of changing seasons, the thing we all share is the experience of suffering. A moment’s observation may stand in as a piercing metaphor: Spring’s anticipation, Summer’s lassitude, Autumn’s anxiety, Winter’s dread. And perhaps pricked by that dart of connection upon reading a haiku, we might also share one more thing – joy.
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Just to be fair, I imagine my Spring haiku is not really an indictment of inane people chattering around me. On a dark night after rain, the lonesome trill of an American toad rising from down in the woods is a peace offering. My son and I stood on the deck last night and heard it together. Yes, it was very dark. This morning, light has returned. Again. Oh my. The season rolls on.
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❦
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In 1685, the Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai adapted the 24 Solar Terms of the Chinese calendar for Japan and created 72 seasons. As we learn at SeasonWords.com, these 72 seasons “offer a poetic journey through the Japanese year in which the land awakens and blooms with life and activity before returning to slumber.” Mark, the site’s curator and naturalist, shares lessons from nature corresponding to the seasons; haiku both ancient and modern that complement the lesson; and craft tips / kigo with a prompt and an invitation. Readers share their haiku and receive commentary.
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Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Ridge
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1.
One day I found the outline of a deer
in the snow. She’d slept on the old logging road
above our home, curled against the cold.
 . 
Her imprint on a trail I’d walked for
twenty years was intricate and vulnerable
as I now feel since strangers bought this land.
 . 
their cameras
nailed to the trunks of trees
Christ
 . 
2.
At first I waved. New to the neighborhood,
the seemed shy. Hovering at the side
of the road with their harnessed dogs, they walked
 . 
harnessed too, shoulders hunched, eyes averted.
About their money I didn’t then know, or
Appalachian families letting go of land.
 . 
orange flags
festoon the property lines
orioles in snow
 . 
3.
What we had of commons among
hill people here is gone, our hollow hollowed
out, our waves, our lifted heads, our calls across
 . 
casual borders fretted now by registered
mail. “Not authorized.” “Legal action.” They’ve
no bonds to sunder because they’ve no bonds made.
 . 
camera 1
my shetland sheepdog framed
first day of spring
 . 
4.
Surveyed for surveillance, the ridge. But I
can love what I don’t own. I miss the oaks,
their wide-girthed stillness. I miss the mountain’s
 . 
spine. Across family lands and state lines,
through Cherokee and Appalachian time,
the mountains stay. The mountains stay. They stay.
 . 
a taloned sun sets
the red-tailed hawk
needs no human hand
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Creatures – so we are. We seek what all creatures seek, but especially we seek the closeness of other creatures. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is visited by crows and grieves for house wrens dying and for cows separated from their calves. She reveals her creature’s struggle and confusion as she loses her mother. She is not afraid to say that she hesitates to speak of death because every creature must face death but fears to do so. She reveals moments and connections and we readers look about us to discover her light is casting our own shadow. And in the closing section of Creature, Kathryn Kirkpatrick has written the finest collection of dog poems I’ve read in twenty years.
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Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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On Finding Monarch Caterpillars in September
 . 
And whatever love a parent
feels stealing bread for a starving
child, I have it as I dig by
the flimsy light of my bargain
headlamp, having driven miles for the last
of the chain-store milkweed, which will
feed these ravenous young in their striped
skins, who are no metaphor, who stand for
themselves only, though in my ecological
worry, my long-range fright, I am surely
standing for something as I shovel in the dark.
 . 
Kathryn Kirkpatrick
from Creature, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2025.
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In their multi-generational migration pattern, the endangered monarch butterfly bears its fourth generation in September and October. Rather than dying after two to six weeks as the earlier generations do, this generation migrates to warmer climates like California and Mexico, living six to eight months before starting the process again. – K.K.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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For the Unseen

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Julie Suk]
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We’re Small on the Rim
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of comprehension, but that shouldn’t distract
us from the fig tree
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bent by fleshy globes on the verge of fall,
seed exposed where the fruit splits.
 . 
And there are the aunts
leaning over a cast-iron kettle filled
with sugar, spices, and a curl of lemon zest –
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figs stewing, jars lined up, the ladle lifted
for a sample sip –
++++ never mind the times my lips were burned
++++ by a sweetness giving more than I gave back.
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Hold out your hand for the unseen
my grandfather said.
 . 
There, the universe,
a potpourri of energy lit by colorful fires
that sparked me to life,
 . 
++++ accident though it was,
 . 
limb of the fig tree scratching the house,
on the table, a spoon.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I am crying for the beauty of these trees. An upwelling of emotion? A brain response slung through limbic system from temporal lobe because of certain inverted images on my retina? No, a watery reaction to pollen. Hazel catkins stirring in the breeze. An itch, a sneeze. But still I am crying for the beauty of these little trees.
 . 
How one says a thing is more important that what one says. We stop along the nature trail to notice this unequivocal manifestation of Spring – drooping yellow pollen catkins on American Hazelnut, full and fertile long before any leaves appear. These are the male flowers. Where are the female? Solitary at the tips of limbs and buds, discover a few spidery red florets no bigger than your little fingernail. From these tiny nubs the nuts will form and we can eat them in September if we beat the squirrels. As I point out the female flowers, how they point mostly outward and upward away from the catkins, I catch myself before blurting this explanation: “They’re designed to prevent self pollination.”
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Designed? The Hazels worked out this arrangement of their own volition? Or had it planned for them de novo on some cosmic drawing board? Oh Evolution, how you embrace the random and non-linear, and how we struggle to grasp such a universe. I gulp and begin a different tack. “Self pollination increases the risk of recessive traits and may weaken the line. Over many, many generations, the Hazel trees that happen to grow with their little red flowers poised to catch pollen blown in from a neighbor tree are more likely to have strong offspring that can pass that trait along.”
 . 
And does that explain why I cry for the beauty of these trees? All these trees? The red maples are already dropping their polleniferous bundles as winged seeds unspool from female flowers. Stony hickory nuts are still discoverable beside the trail from last fall’s excellent mast season. The green furze we spy at the ridgeline’s crown is tuliptrees’ earliest budbreak. The trees speak their names in the space they fill. They give their promises almost silently but always sure. There seems no end to the means my own species can devise to make the world harsh, hateful, ugly. There is no end to the beauty of these trees. I cry.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Dream It Was
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Gone, the apples left last night for the deer –
 . 
shadows lighter than the night they passed through,
rune-like hoof marks carving the frosted lawn.
 . 
Like a dream,
but touch is my familiar.
 . 
May you and I morph into other bodies that meet
once this one goes
 . 
on and on into the blue heights – old trails
like those deer use around the girth of a mountain.
 . 
And after breath evaporates
may the words left without a tongue
fall into the pool where we swam,
 . 
the cold waters rushing back warm.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Hold out your heart for the unseen. When there are no longer lips, a mouth, to hold our words may they pool in the places we loved. May we meet again on the blue heights, on some new trail, on a very old trail. What voice would you choose in your next life? Listen for me, a song of wind thin in the high branches.
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❦
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What would the new day hold for us if each morning we were astonished to wake? Dogwood scratches the window as wind picks up. Throaty testosterone rumbles as the teenager across the street starts his pickup to head to school. What could urge me out of bed instead of surrendering to warmth and pulling the covers higher? But this is a new day, the vernal equinox in fact. I confess I have reached the time of life when I can see the days ticking on ahead of me are finite in number.
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Turning each page in Julie Suk’s Astonished to Wake is a reminder that new days are in short supply. Perhaps this one will weave its meaning from days treasured in their remembering. Perhaps this one would prefer to eat me raw. Perhaps this is the day I really will wake up and notice every person that has made my life, and even tell them so. A good book of poetry compels one to turn each page, then the next. A great book of poetry compels one to set the book aside and enter the newness of this day.
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❦
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From Charlotte, NC, and former managing editor of Southern Poetry Review, Julie Suk has been a beacon in the world for poetry for decades. R. T. Smith writes, “The poetry of Julie Suk is at once deceptively spare and metaphorically rich, and the sensual mystery of her perfectly pitched and etched lines is haunting, elemental, and wild.” Her many awards include the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Astonished to Wake is Julie’s sixth collection, published by Jacar Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Music
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When my father was young, he played the violin,
his mother, the rosewood Grand.
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She also had a voice clear and sweet,
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also had tuberculosis and died
when my father was thirteen.
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He never played again, but loved music,
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the Victrola making its rounds,
or the two of us listening to opera on the radio.
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No noise allowed in the house when Rosa Ponselle sang.
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In my next life I want the voice of a violin.
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Tell me what you’d like played
and I’ll speak from the key of love and pain,
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how the living are echoes of the past,
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my grandmother staring into the darkness – as I do now,
thinking of those I must leave.
 . 
Talking into the night,
we’ll hold sorrow up close and let it weep.
 . 
Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
 .Doughton Park Tree 2021-02-23 
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Unseen Life

Posted in Ecopoetry, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2024| 14 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Catherine Carter]
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Good morning, unseen
John-John was back from college and told Moses that 99 percent of
the matter in the universe is invisible to the human eye. Ever since,
Moses made sure to greet what he could not see.
        –“A Good Story,” Sherman Alexie,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
 . 
Good morning, bacteria
breeding in my coiled gut,
your endless collective of many
the true core of my one. Good
morning, yeasts fermenting
diligently away at all my crevices
and folds, and magnetic field
of gravity which grounds me so close
to this home planet, your pull connecting
the water in this flesh with the drag
of the moon beneath these feet.
Good morning, hairs of fungi
connecting tree to tree and all
earth to all other earth. Good morning,
trails of mouse urine
through the multifarious paths
of grass, which to the vision
of the hovering sparrow hawk glow
ultraviolet, forming arrows
which point the way to the door
of the soft grass-lined burrow.
Good morning, possum crushed
by the roadside, visible but
from which most eyes flick away,
your unseen atoms already
disaggregating to take on fresh
lives as fly larva, carrion beetle, silver
flash beneath the flight pinion
fo the black buzzard, the death-
devourer. Good morning, unmet eyes
of Maria, whose home is this
intersection’s northeast corner;
good morning, ongoing anguish
of the lumbar vertebra fractured
in the stockroom job where she
broke and was fired for breaking;
good morning, urgent grip
of the bowels she must walk
a mile to relieve from this corner
where she stands with her sign
hoping for change that won’t come.
And good morning, unrecorded
conference called in a corner suite,
which even now is about to close
the shelter where tonight she hopes to sleep.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Not secret. Not hidden. Neither cloaked nor covert, simply not seen. These are the glimpses of my mother’s life I am getting since she died. No tremors from within locked strongboxes, no heart attacks delivered by anonymous post – simply the small bright fragments of her unseen life. The bits not dependent on her being Mom to me.
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I’m paying more attention to the glimpses because I don’t have Mom beside me on the couch any more, although she was never one to draw attention to herself anyway. Here they come, all these versions of my mother through the years, fragmentary visions arriving in photos I’ve glanced at in the past but never really examined. Here she is on her bike, smiling, maybe ten years old; here’s that very same smile again at another age, at every age. What confidence, what honesty! So open. A real person smiling at me.
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Today I’ve found her college annuals – do universities still publish such things? Do people still save them for 75 years? Here’s Mom with the other officers of her Freshman class, 1946, and she the President. I never knew! As a Junior her she is at the centerfold – with a dozen friends – from their listing in Who’s Who in American Universities. The two women beside her remained her friends for life, names even I recall her mentioning. Such a full, rich world Mom inhabited. So many worlds.
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In a few weeks we’ll hold Mom’s memorial service and I’ll no doubt hear even more stories of her unseen life. Already Linda’s youngest sister has told us how she loved Miss Cookie as her Kindergarten teacher. Linda and I were already away at college; the only glimpse I had of Mom’s teaching life was when she brought the gerbils and ducklings home from her classroom for holidays. I wish I’d had the curiosity and imagination to follow her around her world for a few days. But no – she was just our Mom.
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Grief is the empty place beside me on the couch that becomes the empty place inside. I try to fill it with memories, all those moments I’ve known and seen, but they aren’t nearly enough. Where to find more? Show me everything I missed before so I can try harder to open my eyes. Show me every bright fragment. Good morning, Unseen.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
This Stone
 . 
This stone is a particular stone,
mica-flecked lichen-splotched quartz-
veined hunk of granite hunched
by the side of the road where I climb the cove.
It has a history; it has been places.
It knew the molten earth-heart
and the grind of the glacier.
It gouged grooves in the flesh
of this world as gravity dragged it down.
It crushed small plants in its path,
and offered a matrix to lichen,
coolness to soil in the heat of the day,
shelter to mushrooms, midges, mice.
This one particular manifestation
of all that rockness,
created in fire, is still
joining in creation,
participating in being. It has known
billions of mornings; this one
is new. Though it will not answer,
I nod to it as I pass, and, if no one
human is there to hear, I speak:
good morning, you one
rock exactly like no
other. Here we are again,
short life and long one
brushing past each other beside
this road of crushed and broken
stone. Good morning,
spirit of earth, on this one morning
here on earth’s stony flesh.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beyond perception as well as beneath notice, these are the unseen in Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen. The bacteria in our gut upon which our lives and health depend. The homeless woman who might once have thought she could depend on the lives around her. Noticing the ignored and overlooked and essential: Catherine’s piercing images and mind frothing metaphors bring all into stark relief. These poems are revelation.
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How did I miss that? Why am I only now first seeing? Unseen is the dirt that bears me up, unseen is sunlight fusing itself into wood. Glad may be the cat in coyote country but Magic is one man opening the door to one small apartment as refuge. It’s all around us, always has been. The first commandment is “pay attention.” Forgive us for how often we have sinned.
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❦
 . 
Catherine Carter’s Good Morning, Unseen is available from Jacar Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The unseen says
 . 
from the magnolia I wave to you through the wind,
my dark leaves quivering in the glitter of winter
sun, though I knew you would not see.
As the dog I rest my chin on our bed,
tell you it’s safe to wake, as you shudder with the fear
and despair you clutch so close.
Under your feet as the dirt I bear you up;
as the air without which you cannot live
two hundred seconds, I lift your rigs again, again,
seven hundred million times, never wearying
until you do. As the sunlight I fuse myself
into wood, bursting forth again in flame;
as the rain I show you safe passage, falling,
seeping, leaping through my selves the clouds and the sea.
As you breathe, as you drink as you stretch cramped hands
to my electric coil, toast me in the bread, you ask
whether I’m even here, or forget to ask.
Refugee on the long road, back bent
with the treasures you lug, the fears you haul:
lay down the weighted silver, your grandparents;
plate and grief, let home evaporate behind you,
unbind the albatross corpse festering your neck.
Set it all down. Be free of it,
and take my hand in yours. With a second hand,
and a third, I pipe for you now:
just for a moment, dance.
 . 
Catherine Carter
from Good Morning, Unseen, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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