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Posts Tagged ‘Kelsay Books’

Widow Makers

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2025| 8 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Sandra Dreis]
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The Vestibule
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I fear the snake plant
crouching on the coffee table,
crackled celadon planter
a get-well gift for Grandma
Gertie from distant cousin Fay.
 . 
It arrived yesterday, cat-beast
with bulging eyes that will prowl
room to room while Grandma,
small and fragile in her big chair,
sleeps. Stark plant, no leaves,
only sharp swords unsheathed.
 . 
I stall. Linger in light, the sunny
vestibule my barrier island,
face pressed into lace curtains
stretched tight over glass double doors.
I’m six. Safe. Separate from the mainland
of scary things. Cancer.
 . 
My blond frizz catches elastic, necklace
strung last summer from odd seashells
as we hummed together in the kitchen.
How Grandma dipped the fountain pen’s
gold tip in a bottle of dark blue ink,
 . 
etching columns in a heavy ledger,
numbers and letter so curly and pretty,
scratch-scratch-blot-blot-blot,
her easy script clear as the crystal
doorknob I dare not turn.
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Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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How safe is safe enough, and how safe too safe? Third day of backpacking, Mike and I arrive at a clearing and scout for a good tent site. Not too much slope, head higher than heels, no roots or stones, at least none too big. Ah, here it is, the perfect spot. Per our usual routine we lie down in the leaves to test the lay, and then Mike looks up. Nope. Thirty feet above our heads is a dead branch big around as your thigh. If that thing cracks free in a midnight gust, our wives will be cashing in the policies. Find a different site.
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Fifteen years later Linda is still not a widow and I should be grateful that she seems to intend to keep it that way for a while yet. Last Thursday I was hoping to hike up the Mountains-to-Sea Trail for a work day above Stone Mountain State Park, but a front moved in and lashed the house all night. The morning forecast still warned of gusts up to 35 mph. Lots of dead branches in all those trees. Did I decide to stay home for me or for Linda?
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Looking at the photos of my braver friends who did spend the day on the trail, I wish I’d gone with them. Yes, I do. Which regret is more bitter, doing the thing that gets you into a mess of trouble or not doing the thing that only might have? I suppose if a tree falls on you, your regret is swift and sharp but it isn’t going last very long (nor are you), whereas I’ve been moping for a week that I didn’t give those trees a chance to get me.
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Which just proves . . . nothing. The tree that gets me will be the one I didn’t see coming. Rue and remorse and the road not taken are great for writing a poem but not particularly useful for getting out of bed each morning. I’ll stir up a tasty stew of the past and savor it when a good meal of recollection is called for, but I’ll do my best not to choke on it.
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On the other hand, nothing is altogether sorry or useless if it reminds you occasionally to look up.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Charles, Triple Pirouette – 1983
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They share spartan diets, actor’s nightmares,
sore feet. Meet in a Hell’s Kitchen laundry room.
He’s drying, reading a Bible, waiting.
She’s washing a basket of dance clothes
and sweats. He hands her a needed quarter.
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Turns out, she’s directing and casting
a twenty-city tour, so they chat away.
Excellent pay. He light ups, demonstrates
a triple pirouette in sneakers – on carpet.
His easy-going pizzazz, an instant hire.
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Bright-eyed even for early morning rehearsals,
he’s warmed-up and ready. During breaks, a loner,
he reads the Bible. In hotel lobbies, on plane rides.
To sassy cast members, he winks, “I’ll pray for you.”
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Performances end by Christmas, yet nobody hears
from Charles. The gossip train – Radio City nabbed him,
for sure. But his roommate calls her from St. Vincent’s.
Charles is gone. A rare pneumonia. Enough said.
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Bath towels thud, dryer drum pounds. Her face flushes
pink as she opens to door to bereft. Puff of heat.
Steam dissipates, clothes churn and settle with a sigh.
Oh, Charles.
Bible in hand, he gently spins to a stop.
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Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The three steps required to create a poetry book, perhaps in decreasing order of difficulty, are choosing which poems to include, deciding how to order and arrange them, and picking a title. None of the three are easy but creating a title is the most mysterious. Many poets cop out and just use the title of one of the poems in the collection – but how do you decide which one is THE poem? Someday soon I’m going to create a found poem using only the titles of the hundreds of poetry books lurking in every corner of my house. I think I’ll title it, “New and Selected.”
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Cultured Pearls by Sandra Brodkin Dreis – where does that title come from and what is its deeper meaning? The only reference to pearls among the poetry is spotless white sandals, silky pearl-button cardigan in Kingdom of Immaculate, which lingers with the poet’s mother in her last days of dementia. A cultured pearl is a beautiful artifact, a human effort to replicate and even improve upon nature. It is a commonplace bit of shell formed by machining into a sphere but then over the course of a year or longer within the mantle of a living mollusk layered with exquisite nacre.
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Perhaps every one of us is a cultured pearl. Throughout our lives we struggle to create the artifact of our persona, but our life itself creates the strange chemistry that makes us who we are. Inventory our insides and you get a fairly boring list: carbon, calcium, nitrogen, oxygen; sugar, protein, necklaces of nucleotide; bone, fat, gristle. But the sac which holds these elements and molecules and tissues, the mantle that continuously forms and reforms us, is wit, humor, curiosity, love.
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These poems by Sandra Dreis are indeed such a nacreous mantle. So many pearls inhabit her lines – cherished friends lost to AIDS, family members scarred by prejudice and displacement, loved ones fading and dying. She holds their luster up to us. She reminds us how they have shone. She may admit the grit and schmutz that make up the heart of persons, but she also opens the shell and reveals each one’s unique beauty. So, Sandra . . . nice title!
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❦
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Cultured Pearls is available from Kelsay Books. Sandra Dreis lives in Winston-Salem and has had a long career as dancer, educator, novelist, and poet.
Read Raven’s Beak by Sandra at this previous intallment of VERSE & IMAGE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Early Grey
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Mom does not remember
Earl Grey tea. That she prefers it.
That she loves it. No sugar. Just plain
No lemon. God forbid – milk.
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For all she knows, Earl Grey is a fine gentleman
riding from his castle in the English countryside,
galloping on his well-groomed steed. He halts
by the rocky brook to adjust his fine felt hat.
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Mom, at 93. My reminders, steady fuel,
stoke the furnace of her runaway locomotive.
But Mom, you love Earl Grey, your favorite!
Really? I do? Well, okay. If you say so.
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Consider young Earl – Mom’s former sixth-grader
who threatened to kill himself. New York City
Police apprehended him on the 59th St. Bridge.
That Earl, she claims, took years off her life.
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Perhaps Earl Grey – could he be an uncle?
A Jewish uncle named, Harry Grey, emigrated
as Harry Greenberg from a shtetl in Russia.
Maybe Ellis Island saw fit to shorten his name.
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The copper kettle shrieks, Mom unaware.
I pour steaming tea and fill our porcelain cups
with disbelief. Small kitchen table. We sit before
a plate of scones. Mom smiles. We steep.
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Sandra Brodkin Dreis
from Cultured Pearls, Kelsay Books, American Fork, UT; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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Rushing

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2024| 10 Comments »

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[ with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
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Adaptation
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Some days I hardly remember
what it is to fly
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what loss is
When morning feels like betrayal
and shoulders ache
with the sudden load of gravity
pressed into cruel bones
too human for wings
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As if I never once awoke
hair smelling of clouds
wound in wild knots
and damp with tears
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or slept
curled in a crevice of wind
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Other days I recall myself
grace confined to memory
in which I have never flown
and it was only ever a tale
from childhood
I was never meant to believe
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Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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A shift in warmth of Pacific seas, a wet winter in the South: throughout January a storm a week, sometimes two, but this afternoon we are braving mud to hike our favorite trail from Carter Falls to Grassy Creek. The little farm pond is full and we see the channel where it overflows to carve a deeper path through last summer’s grasses and sedges. Both white pine groves have evidence of freshets, scoured hardpan courses with needles layered thick along each side. We cross Martin Byrd Road to enter the woods that curve alongside the big cornfield and wonder what we’ll find. Even though the acres are planted in winter rye, how much soil has rushed off those slopes and furrows into Grassy Creek?
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The trail quickly turns downhill and we see the storms’ impact. Red field clay has silted full the first drainage swale and overtopped it to rush down the trail bed in a boiling soupy froth. Exposed roots and deep mud. Our trail crews clean out these erosion control features twice a year but one wet January has damaged the trail more than ten years of hikers’ boots. Too much water, too much incline, too much gravity.
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Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep, writes Rae Spencer of water. It must seek its level, it must flow, it must rush. Water and time alike, each of them relentless and not to be held back. Have I spent too much of my life rushing? Have I abandoned will and wisdom to be always doing, doing? Even now my dreams are filled with urgency, long hallways, behind each door a patient fretting to be seen, and I with no hope of catching up. Waking from such, who would want to get out of bed and get started?
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Better trail design can’t completely compensate for poor tillage and agricultural neglect, but the rest of today’s trail is actually in quite good shape. The outer berm has been mostly raked clear and there are several grade dips and rises that keep water from following the treadway. When we reach the more rustic forest bathing trail, it’s even better – consistent outsloping camber, plenty of runoff. Water’s gonna rush. Life too, I guess. How to prepare? How to respond? How to slow things down for a bit? A walk through quiet woods, a quiet hour with a book of poetry – maybe tonight my dreams will proceed more leisurely.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Of Warbler and Quail
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Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else
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But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer
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As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back
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But this little warbler
outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear
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Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent
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Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore
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Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks
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That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar
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And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars
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Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail
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Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here
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Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Memory – home – loss – the path forward: Rae Spencer’s poetry has a distinctly formal feel as she settles deeply into these themes. Formal in the sense of meticulous language, lush natural imagery and description, architectural lines, internal rhyme. These poems need to be read slowly as they linger in the moment before releasing one to ponder and discover the writer’s metaphors, and discovering one’s own.
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Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. I am perfectly happy to pause and listen with warbler and bobwhite as the poet weaves from their stories one of longing for home (Of Warbler and Quail). I think I’m ready now for racoon to teach me how to live (Adaptable). At the close of Doppler Effect, I sit and listen long to the change in pitch of life I know I must expect, and prepare for, as my own parents age and travel their final days.
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Poetry, in its phrasing, its junctures, its juxtaposition, often moves at the pace of breath. Speak it aloud, pause when it needs you to. Stop and linger in the midst of these lines so that they may breathe into you.
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❦
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[hint: I re-type the poems for these posts (thank you to my freshman touch typing teacher), fingers slower than scanning eyes, speaking the words individually in my head, each syllable and carriage return (aka line break) – so often in the adagio the lines reveal secrets of how they mean.]
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Rae Spencer lives in Virginia, USA. As well as writing, she is a practicing veterinarian. Of Warbler and Quail first appeared in Bolts of Silk. Gravity first appeared in vox poetica.
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Watershed is available from Kelsay Books HERE. Learn more about Rae HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Gravity
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Water doesn’t want
It only weighs
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Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep
Downhill, settling to the lowest pool
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Rivers cascade and marshes ooze
Toward inlet and gulf
Where tides surge
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With the arid moon
Sere face lowered
In serene reflection
Over oblivious blue
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Depths that teem with tin and polyp
Oyster clades awash in brine
That neither murmurs nor sighs
Through a shell
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Held to the ear we hear
Blood’s heave
An eternal chorus
Singing sailors to sea
Dreamers to sleep
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Daughters to voice
Their bare feet anchored
In restless churn
On heavy, ancient shores
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Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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