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Time’s Line

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, family, L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award, LSU Press, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 10, 2025| 3 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Earth says

I am your mother as the horse

is mother to the louse, endlessly

intricate interlocking systems

which the blissfully sucking louse

cannot imagine and never must,

which it sums up

in some louse-sign for God

a quiver of hairs of the thorax,

a shimmer of inarticulate

gratitude for satiation and for

preservation of self, self, self.

I am sick of it, mother

with eight billion toddlers

not counting my beautiful beetles,

a horse plagued with lice, and yet.

I am your mother as you are mother

to the mosquito which hovers

over your arm as you write,

mote of thirsty gold quivering

with desperation to the boom

of great rivers in blue tunnels

and pipes just below the soft leather

scrim of skin, endless life

you’ll never miss and won’t let her have,

enough for a thousand generations.

If she tries to drink you will want

to swat her flat, and she must try,

for her unborn young, for her life. And maybe

eventually, weary of swatting,

worn down by importunity,

unwilling compassion, fear

of the insect apocalypse blossoming

all around you like the mushroom

cloud, you will incline your head. Fall

still. Let her drink her fill

and float away, a dandelion spore

on the summer air, in the hot flash

of May morning light.

Catherine W. Carter

❦ ❦ ❦

Imagine a straight line. It’s Geometry’s simplest one-dimensional structure. It’s the shortest distance from here to there. It’s a diagram of my life on earth. Maybe my life seems bumpy and ridden with twists but no, it starts at my beginning, forges straight through, and ends at my ending. My timeline. Beyond that it becomes someone else’s line, “me” in their memories.

It’s no accident that we all use the word timeline. (Instead of timepolygon or timecube?) Time’s line, even though it wields only one dimension, is all the vessel I have to contain my life. In fact, there is one single point on that line that holds the entirety of my awareness. I’ll label that point now. Every part of the line to the left is the extent of what has already been now and is now no more. Label it past. Everything to the right consists of nows yet to come. As I write this, several nows have just slipped by me.

How many? How many nows have I filled up (wasted?) with staring across the room wondering what to write next? Do next? Think next? Be? I shudder to even attempt an answer to that, because in exactly the same way Geometry tells us that the line is continuous, no gaps, an infinity between each point, time is also a continuum. No missing pieces. No quanta. I could fit an infinity of nows between any two nows I choose.

That adds up to a helluva lot of timeline spent worrying about my son. An infinity imagining the conversations we could have had that would have set us right, the conversations we could have tomorrow that would correct our course, revising those conversations, projecting out to the right the results of our conversations or absences thereof. Not to mention replaying out to the left the segments of line I’ll label regret.

Until now. I return home late and my son is waiting up. He tells me he’s come to a turning point. We hug. How many nows does that fill? How many is infinity? Hey Time, just for a moment, please stop now.

❦ ❦ ❦

When you know a witch’s true name

she has to do what you ask. If she tries

to refuse, her name lets you tighten the wire

on marrow-fears she’s spent forever

trying to hide, secret shames which sicken

her so she’d almost rather strangle than share:

the reason she wraps herself in that caul

of hexes, chainsaws, shielding spells.

This makes witches cautious.

Except something in them, in us

all, wants to hear someone say

our names with recognition, no matter

what comes after. Curled round

our glint of treasure, our shimmer

of power, we’re gongs hung

to tremble to our one true name

or one true question, the one we’ve awaited

forever, whose answer is our whole lives,

the one almost no one is interested

enough to ask. It’s why I’d come

if you summoned me up, despite.

If you knew the right question,

I would tell you anything.

Catherine W. Carter

❦ ❦ ❦

I’m just / what comes next when everything touches everything.

Is By Stone and Needle a book of charms and spells? Are its lines sigils and hexes that, in the hands of the seeker, reveal arcane wisdom? Is it the words of Myth and Magic, Nature and Earth that we have feared to hear and at the same time longed for?

Catherine Carter’s language is afraid of nothing. It breaks down every door. It wrenches meaning from syllables that never before dared to be said so close together. Earth, though I tremble to admit it, I guess I’ve suspected you may well be tempted to swat us like a mosquito (although I’ve always known you love your beetles). And Love, I do believe you are out there hoping to strike the gong of our true names. I am still traveling the journey of these pages. By stone and needle I trust I will find my way. And at the end find myself.

❦

Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

These poems are dense, delicious, scary, enlightening. I will feature two more poems from the collection at next weeks posting (October 17, 2025).

❦ ❦ ❦

The concepts of the line as unbroken continuum, the inseparable connection we make between that line and the set of all real numbers it compasses, and our human perception of time as an unbroken line are developed in a small book my wife Linda studied in college fifty years ago and which we discovered cleaning out bookcases this month:

One cover blurb states, “This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands.” Albert Einstein

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No Foolin’ Fred Chappell

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged April 1, Bill Griffin, Fred Chappell, imagery, LSU Press, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on April 1, 2022| 20 Comments »

C ++++ THE EPIGRAMMATIST

Mankind perishes. The world goes dark.
He racks his brain for a tart remark.

Fred Chappell

. . . . . . .

Poets are a sober and studious lot. Profoundly introspective, respectably staid. Their rhymes are the quintessence of conservatism and decorum, their meter most martial. Their lines are ever crafted and solid as Cold War architecture, their images invariably illuminate and never titillate. Their thoughts are only a little lower than the angels’.

No poet and no poet’s poetry better represent these fundamental verities than Fred Chappell and Fred Chappell’s. For today’s APRIL FIRST missive we have selected the utmost in staid, respectable, and illuminating offerings from a book by Old Fred (as he has called himself) titled simply C (Roman numeral “100,” designating the exact number of poems in the book as well as Dr. Chappell’s initial, which this writer had not actually remarked upon for the first 29 years that he owned this book until today over lunch while he was reading aloud and his wife commented on the typeface, then pointed out the connection to the author’s last name). Illuminatio Lector.

. . . . . . .

V ++++ HOW TO DO IT

“Chappell – you who love to jest –
Hear the things that make life blest:
Family money not got by earning;
A fertile farm, a hearthfire burning;
No lawsuits and no formal dress;
A healthy body and a mind at peace;
Friends whom tactful frankness pleases;
Good meals without exotic sauces;
Sober nights that still spark life;
A faithful yet a sexy wife;
Sleep that makes the darkness brief;
Contentment with what you plainly need;
A death not longed for, but without dread.”
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ – Martial

VI ++++ REJOINDER

Now let’s even up the score
And tell what things make life a bore:
Sappy girls who kiss and tell;
Televangelists’ threats of hell;
Whining chain saws, mating cats;
Republicans; and Democrats;
Expertly tearful on their knees,
Plushlined senators copping pleas,
Swearing by the Rock of Ages
That they did not molest their pages;
Insurance forms and tax reports;
Flabby jokes and lame retorts;
Do-gooders, jocks, and feminists;
Poems that are merely lists.

. . . . . . .

Fred Chappell is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. He has received the Bollingen Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. His fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages and received the Best Foreign Book Award from the Académie Française. He was the poet laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002. [bio from LSU PRESS]

. . . . . . .

XV ++++ UPON A CONFESSIONAL POET

You’ve shown us all in stark undress
The sins you needed to confess.
If my peccadilloes were so small
I never would undress at all.

XXIII ++++ LITERARY CRITIC

Blandword died, and now his ghost
Drifts gray through lobby, office, hall.
Some mourn diminished presence; most
Can see no difference at all.

XXVI ++++ ANOTHER

Blossom’s footnotes never shirk
The task of touting his own work.

LIII ++++ EL PERFECTO

Senator No sets up as referee
Of everything we read and think and see.
His justification for such stiff decreeing
Is being born a perfect human being
Without a jot of blemish, taint, or flaw,
The Dixie embodiment of Moral Law,
Quite fit and eager to pursue the quarrel
With God Whose handiwork he finds immoral.

. . . . . . .

LXXIX ++++ UPON AN AMOROUS OLD COUPLE

This coltish April weather
Has caused them to aspire
to rub dry sticks together
In hopes that they’ll catch fire.

XLI ++++ RX

Dr. Rigsbee
Drank all my whiskey.
He said, when I objected, “Hell,
Fred, you’re paying me to make you well.”
++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ – Martial

LXVIII ++++ EPITAPH: PREVARICATION

A lonely sorrow
This monument tells:
Here lies one
Who did nothing else.

. . . . . . .

And the penultimate:

XCIX ++++ APOLOGY

If any line I’ve scribbled here
Has caused a politician shame
Or brought a quack a troubled night
Or given a critic a twinge of fear
Or made a poet’s fame appear
Transitory as candleflame,
Why then, I gladly sign my name:
Maybe I did something right.

. . . . . . .

And one last item, and about this there is no fooling:
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MARGARET AND JOSH!

Margaret & Josh , April 1, 2016

LXII ++++ WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

Gale winds tore this tree
And drought and frost came near
To killing it. But see:
In its thirtieth year
It blooms like a candleflame,
And puts its youth to shame.

. . . . . . .