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Pocket Knife

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2025| 10 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]
 . 
Wander Until You Find the Trail Back
 . 
How insistent the world wakes you,
Daylight pushes through dense blinds.
A one-note bird insists on an answer.
Always the same pulsing – waking – wanting
to know what next? How to parse a life
caught in mid-flight, the light a web woven
in the night. All the things we never talk about.
We let the stories we tell ourselves define us.
What would we be without the myths?
Desire contains ire. De- as in deconstruct,
dismantle the dire. Desire nothing. Construct
your own lifeline. Getting lost may be the last
best thing that ever happens.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I think I know where I’ve been and I imagine I know where I’m going. But do I really know anything? I certainly don’t know where this narrative is going. Josh and I are sitting beside a rutted gravel track eating lunch. It’s the last meal of our last day on the trail. Sometime this afternoon a banged up old van will arrive to carry us all back to base camp. While the boys joke around and my co-leaders snooze, I gather some of the trash left by previous loungers and eaters. I lift a sandwich wrapper and discover a pocket knife.
 . 
The summer of 1969 Linda and I started going together. About a week after we held hands for the first ime – had we even kissed yet? – I got on a bus in Akron at 5 AM with three fellow Boy Scouts to spend two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Now it’s the summer of 1983 and our own two kids are teenagers. Josh, our eldest, and I have just finished ten days of hiking Philmont together with his troop – desert plateau and Ponderosa pine forests, rushing gorges and a 12,000 foot peak. Our big adventure is ending. I stuff refuse into my sandwich bag and discover that pocket knife.
 . 
In the summer of 2025 I rummage my desk to return that knife to my pocket. I can’t find it. Turn out the pockets of all my pants, upend my day pack, creep beneath the desk and out to the car under all the seats – not there. I have often pictured the Boy Scout who lost that fine, top-of-the-line Swiss Army Scout’s knife. He had sat there on the ground eating lunch the day before I did. The knife stealthily squeezed its way out of his pocket. He littered his garbage on the knife and never missed it until that night. Too late. Karma. He violated the ethic of Leave No Trace and relinquished his knife to me, diligent trash picker. And such a knife – lock-blade, screw driver & awl, little tweezers and trademark Victorinox toothpick. I will carry it for over forty years, sharpen it and oil it, admire it every time I pull it out and wonder at my worthiness.
 . 
Now I’m imagining someone else finding my knife, excuse me, our knife. Beside a hiking trail where I had squatted to identify a flower? In a parking lot stuck to tar? Appreciate it. Or don’t. I held it for a good long time. This is letting go.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
How to Rebuild Community
 . 
Coming out of the pandemic
+++ I’m having trouble
knowing how to act.
+++ This new landscape
more hardscrabble than highway,
+++ a tightrope walk
not a garden promenade.
 . 
When I offer my outstretched hand
+++ to a woman
I’ve just met, she fixes me
+++ with a chilly stare, says,
I don’t shake hands anymore.
+++ And suddenly I’m ashamed
of my bacteria-filled palm, its brazen
+++ need for connection.
Is it also infected with The Virus? I’m tempted
+++ to rush away, down the hall
and lather that offending hand
+++ with hot sudsy water, the way
we scrubbed our vegetables not so long ago.
 . 
How do I move from cautious
+++ to community?
The knitters know. When they notice
+++ the chaos in the coffee shop,
the customers shouting out orders,
+++ the din around them rising like bread,
impossible to ignore,
+++ Jane stitches herself
to the cash register,
+++ Linda begins bagging cookies
Cathy slices strawberry cake. Their hands
+++ smooth the angry air
grown thick with impatience
+++ and want.
The knitters’ hands fly like needles –
+++ knit one, purl two,
opening, closing, shaping. Each palm
+++ holds a single need to serve.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel writes and writes and writes. Has written, is writing, will write. A solid lifetime of essays, poetry, technical pieces, editing, teaching – her life has been creating with words. Because I Did Not Drown is a portmanteau of Pat’s life, her writing life, her life in writing. A memoir fits pieces into a whole – dates and sequences, family and relationships, loves and desires. A good memoir colors them all with the deeper hues of the soul – fear and disappointment, aspirations and joy. This memoir achieves all that plus one more thing: the crystalline beauty awakened by poetry. Each memory in prose is accompanied by one or two poems. Poems touch and reveal the soul of these moments in Pat’s life.
 . 
I discover myself in these poems, not as outward subject but inward seeker. I often find that I more fully inhabit and participate in the lines of a poem that in a paragraph of prose. The distilled essence of poetry is like volatile spirit that shoots straight from tongue to consciousness. Wonderfully intoxicating. A draught that frees and connects. Next time we meet, Pat and I, we shall surely dance.
 . 
❦
 . 
I can still see that knife. I thought to replace it but the model is no longer manufactured and someone wants eighty bucks on Ebay for one like it. Plus it wouldn’t be the object found, the discovery, the reward. Nevertheless, I can still see that knife because this week I found it shoved in the back of a drawer. Where is this narrative going? Is nothing ever truly lost that once occupied a space in one’s heart? Bosh! Or perhaps the finding is the thing rather than the thing that’s found. Tomorrow I will sit to eat a sandwich with my son and I won’t be able to keep myself from peaking beneath the napkin.
 . 
❦
 . 
Because I Did Not Drown by Pat Riviere-Seel, a memoir in prose and verse, is available from Main Street Rag Enterprises.
 . 
Selected poems from previous books by Pat Riviere-Seel:
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Astonished
+++ for SLM
 . 
how since your death
the natural world keeps itself,
kaleidoscopic, the brilliant shimmer,
sunlight silvering bay leaves, the veins
of water oak, the dogwood’s sad commentary –
now a winsome glow,
as if every molecule of you
infuses this Earth you loved.
 . 
I expected otherwise – had your death been
anything I considered – that the birds and trees,
the swamps and all that still lives would mourn
as we do. The landscape would lose itself,
fade into shades of gray. The rain that all summer
refused to fall would flood the highest ground.
But now you’ve turned to glimmer. Each glance
into the world I thought I knew brings
a new configuration. You remain everywhere.
 . 
Pat Riviere-Seel
from Because I Did Not Drown, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2025
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2015-06-15

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Calculus

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 30, 2025| 2 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Michael Dechane]
 . 
Something So Obvious
 . 
In the hardest days
with their outstretched nights,
whatever is beautiful
in the world recedes.
Light leaches from everything
we see, then. We can’t touch
ordinary goodnesses we might have
let buoy us. All of it fails. Sometimes,
we have to begin again
with something so obvious
and tired as the sunrise.
The wind in long grass.
The light holding back
our eyes from what is under
the surface of the water.
Then, the same light giving
a wrinkled glimpse of stones,
silt, and dark fronds waving
when we shift our stance
half a pace, or even turn
the angle of our face.
Some belief that goodness keeps,
that it might come back one day –
what could that mean today
when there is only the sun
returning in a flat peach wash,
the burning usher of another
Tuesday, coming in with the clanks
and grinding sounds of the city
shaking itself off, reanimating?
A waking we might observe
in colors we may discern
as all the life we lost burns out
of sight, beyond us now, as memory.
 . 
Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
If nothing else will happen
to witness so much alive
may be enough. . . .
from New Year’s Day
 . 
How much joy would it take to counterbalance the suffering of your normal lifespan? How would you quantify it, inchoate summation of glad moments over time divided by accrued heartache, grief, shame? What calculus might determine that life is worth living?
 . 
Last week in California a 26-year old man blew up a fertility clinic and himself. In an online manifest he described himself as “pro-mortalist.” Life is not worth living – bringing new life into the world is a crime. He is an extreme example of adherents of radical utilitarian philosophy. To achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number,” when society burns in chaos and personal joy is not to be found, when “good” is a rare and even unattainable commodity, the calculus of this logic dictates that numbers must be slashed. Decimated.
 . 
How much joy would it take? This morning I lean against the kitchen counter while my son stirs a pot on the stove. He is making his special stone-ground grits, with butter and cream, to take to Granddaddy in the nursing home. We talk about Granddaddy and my son’s reluctance to visit him, to open up to him. We talk about food and the kids and what remarkables we’ve each seen in the woods lately. For half an hour we are simply present for each other.
 . 
How much joy? My son is cooking in my kitchen because he now lives here with me. His marriage of twenty-three years has dissolved. Who can fathom the grief and shame he feels? My grief is bottomless. What can balance such an emptiness? Tonight my son’s daughter will visit to flip cartwheels in our front yard and help my son at the grill. She will pretend to be the maitre d’hotel while she sets the table on the porch and takes our orders. We will eat together. Soon he will drive her home and read Harry Potter before she falls asleep.
 . 
Why must there be any calculus at all? Throw it out. This moment is enough.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Meditation on the Heart
 . 
And then, one day, you see
the copper teakettle on the stove
settled on its iron throne, precisely
in its place in the kitchen landscape.
Where, all these years, it has been
let’s not say faithfully. Not exactly.
But in its home, hallowed within
a scene so familiar it seems known.
The faint blue streaks of verdigris,
even the dullness of the handle,
become beautiful in this long-arriving
moment of recognition. Beneath
its dinge in the pockets of its dents glows
an undiminished gleam. Every morning
it has been lifted, filled, and carried.
Each day, it pours,. But you so rarely
touch it between its burning hours. Now
it is you that is filled as you long
for what you cannot see or say but sing.
 . 
Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At first the poems of The Long Invisible overpower me with sadness. I have to stop after each page and inventory my own life. I grieve for the inhabitants of these lines. I recall a poem by David Manning – Where does the fire go / when it goes out? Do our mistakes extinguish all the good we’ve ever done? Or that we’ve experienced?
 . 
I am rubbish at meditation. As soon as I try to sit in the moment all my failures and painful moments of the past jostle in beside me. Better to read a book of poems like Michael’s. Every moment is true. Pain and epiphany commingle. Here comes a bear, and wild flora, pelicans, all the things we love together. And love itself proves it is no stranger. Here it flares, even when we thought it had gone out.
 . 
We may be rubbish at love, but love is good at us. It doesn’t weigh the balance or work the calculus to some final solution. We only have to give love such a small piece of ourselves. Like poets do. Like this poet does, whose book in what it reveals and what it shares gives us not just a bit of himself but a bit of each one of us as well. Which must certainly be the greatest gift of all.
 . 
❦
 . 
The Long Invisible by Michael Dechane is available from Wildhouse Poetry.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What I’ve Come to Love
 . 
The texture of finely grated ginger.
 . 
Fernet’s herbal alchemy,
its tincture when I close the day.
 . 
All the surprising variegations in a cloud.
 . 
And seven black cows my neighbor keeps.
 . 
Some modest disappointments –
the kind that help me
know I’ve asked too much
and not enough.
 . 
Those parts of myself I kept
locked up on a kind of death row.
 . 
A list that needs
to interrupt me into attentiveness.
 . 
How this, a poem,
can move me beyond
what I knew, then further,
past what I can imagine.
 . 
I’ve come to love portals
into universes that do not exist
until we say they do.
 . 
Whoever you are, I love
your power. I hope it gives life
and sustains goodness for you, and everyone
connected to you: every one of us.
 . 
I know that I’ve come to love
may not love me back
yet. May I keep on loving
then. Keep practicing on stones,
long grass in the grips of a wind,
water, every way that it might be.
 . 
What a help that will be to me
as I turn, at last, to you.
The one I could not know
I was meant and made to love.
I am a stranger, a faceless other,
but you have invited me in.
You give me this time with you.
Forgive me for not believing sooner
in the gift of generosity,
in the hospitable spirit you have
harbored within, all these years, for us.
 . 
Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2014-07-13
 . 

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Spring. Whatever.

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

 . 
[with 3 poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick]
 . 
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.
 . 
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.
 . 
❦
 . 
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.
 . 
Visit https://seasonwords.com/ and subscribe to receive periodic postings in your mailbox!
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Ridge
 . 
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.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.
 . 
Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick at Jacar Press: HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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.
 . 
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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