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Pieces

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2024| 5 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by John Amen]
 . 
Ode to Country Music
+++ after Sparklehorse
 . 
I come from men who shoveled reserve for a living.
Who needs the wings of communion?
The veindrain of forgiveness?
Las night, my drowned brother paused at the fence,
parties his lips to sing, then vanished,
a shy oracle leaving a trail of mud
in the yellow leaves. the world
has always been broken or breaking,
&who can say whether loss or contentment
is the heart’s lifeblood. Who can say
whether time is bored or ambitious. Who’s
beyond reloading, firing a prayer into the long night?
 . 
John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
Who can say whether time flows, one long line cast downstream with the current? Who can say time streams unbroken and we can ride that roller that curls but never crests? We don’t know, we aren’t paying attention, we don’t even feel the tug until we try to stop and look around, try to see what brought us here and where it’s taking us next. Then, if we’re honest, we confess we don’t know anything about time, especially this one particular moment of time. All those past times and all those future times keep roiling our mind like a pebble caught in the mad froth beneath a waterfall, hard edges knocked off until every pebble looks like every other pebble. How do we get back to sharp?
 . 
Who can say time is not clots and frags and whirling pieces, uncoupled and festinating like an old man with one leg shorter than the other? Who can say those sharp chunks of time won’t break open right in front of us over and over and each time we will fall into them from a different angle? Time can be a hard-jawed mastiff that won’t let go of our leg. Time can be a poem that isn’t afraid of the truth and will overtake us no matter how swift we may think we run.
 . 
Dark Souvenirs will break open right in front of you, every time a different angle. Dark Souvenirs will get you back to sharp. John Amen’s poetry is a can of broken glass shaken and scattered across the pavement. The splinters draw blood if you touch them but you can’t manage to hold yourself back. The shards are dull and bright, clear and clouded. Piece by glittering piece they begin to reveal a pattern that skips and stretches across time. The writing of these poems must be a last ditch bid to make sense; the reading of them and re-reading is to join the travail. As Amen himself says in Waiting for the Sibyl who never shows her face: For years I’ve studied the shadows that lurk behind a curtain, listening for a voice in the rafters. . . . I’ve made it my life’s work to put words in her mouth. Time, jagged wrenching unrepentant time can’t save us, but words can try, and sometimes with light to spare.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Days of Love & Horses
 . 
That Memorial Day when I was nine,
the demon leapt from my father’s hands.
My wax-paper mom crumpled in the kitchen,
surrounded by coffee mugs. All June & July,
trailers, U-hauls, our house was gaveled
into smoky embers. I kept flying Emily, though,
my Morgan with the milky left eye, surging
above the hospital, courthouse, labor camp.
++++ These days I rarely see a horse,
but that smoldering August
before the glow turned to ash,
I found myself lost in Scriven’s Holler,
toeing those dinosaur traps in the jimsonburr.
Emily carried me through Jones’s Gulley,
past the gray & yellow farms, night crashed
as we reached the dilapidated barn.
++++ Years later, May ‘99, IC unit on the Oconoluftee,
I grabbed for rocks, branches, craving subsided.
Sprawled on a grassy bank,
I dialed three exes, apologized
for stampeding through their sober lives.
A friend had warned me not to expect sorrys in return.
Good thing, I didn’t get any.
++++ Recently in a restless dream, I beheld
that familiar kitchen. My wife hummed the national anthem,
frying slabs of meat in a Mississippi wok. I crawled the floor,
gathering the coffee mugs, & woke to the canter of rain.
++++ I haven’t climbed a saddle in decades,
but when sleep eludes me, skull
throbbing with twisted math & phantom schemes,
I pretend I’m atop my loyal Emily,
we’re stranded in a minefield, blind beneath moonless sky.
I squeeze my thighs against her mahogany loins,
bury my face in her mane.
The champing in my belly calms, dawn returns,
the jumps I need to clear don’t seem as insurmountable
as when the world is smothered in darkness
We make it home again, with light to spare.
 . 
John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
John Amen is founder and managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His five previous poetry collections include Illusion of an Overwhelm (NYQ Books), which was finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Many of the poems in Dark Souvenirs explore addiction and recovery. A moment that recurs is John’s brother Richard’s suicide. Reading the book cover to cover in sequence one enters a mystical landscape without pathway or signpost, where time makes its own rules and where meaning gradually but persistently accrues as if percolating up through the floorboards of the subconscious.
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Purchase Dark Souvenirs from the publisher, New York Quarterly Books.
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❦
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So is time a continuum or is time quantized? Is it a silky thread or pieces? Is there a smallest finite particle of time of which all emergent time is an integer multiple? Is time even real, or is time simply a perceptual phenomenon, an illusion our consciousness creates to make sense of the quantum reality utterly beyond our perception or comprehension?
 . 
No one knows! But you and I certainly know how time refuses to be shackled or delimited in dreams, and when we awake we know that moments supposedly separated by vast measures of time crowd in close and overwhelm. Only poetry can corral and release time, its sharp jab in the ribs, its clutch around the heart, its cool hand on the forehead. With wary reluctance and a shudder I say this to time – Welcome!
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Dark Souvenirs
 . 
I studied your craft,
how you drove the demon of gluttonous age
from his hiding place,
freeing the infant who starved for 84 years,
pang & its host
dismantled with a single twitch.
Little mess, little clean-up,
nailbrush, toothbrush, soapy sponge.
No mention in the real-estate ad,
the previous owner’s
impeccable marksmanship.
No way to preserve your opus,
air that still trembles,
trying to catch its breath.
Memory does its best
to salvage a keepsake
– pulp, bullet, bone,
a new constellation in the night sky –
but symbols are lost,
art fails, except as it screams at the dead.
I hope what remains of you
can recognize my voice.
 . 
John Amen
from Dark Souvenirs, NYQ Books of New York Quarterly Foundation; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-03-07
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That Isn’t Me

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 6, 2024| 7 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Cheryl Wilder]
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Anything That Happens
 . 
Until I was twenty, I believed anything
wouldn’t happen to me.
 . 
Walking from the car,
leaving you behind,
 . 
sirens whining louder as they closed on us;
I didn’t understand anything
 . 
had just happened.
People said it wasn’t my fault
 . 
and for reassurance,
It could have been me. But
 . 
I heard what they didn’t say.
I’m so glad it wasn’t.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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It’s 1990 and my kids are cruising toward teenagerdom. Every week in the throw-away medical journals that cross my desk there’s at least one article with a title like We Never Even Suspected, or Why Me? The doctor or doctor’s spouse laments about their teen who is (pick one): flunking out of college; a closet alcoholic; pregnant out of wedlock; addicted to Percocet. That becomes the one article I am compelled to read before assigning the journal to the round file. It’s a solid principal of statistics: if it happened to them it’s that much less likely to happen to me.
 . 
Because today in 1990 my kids are, well, not perfect but above average. They are so good. And I am so good. Whatever that other doctor did to cause his child to go wrong, I would never do that. Because somehow at this interchange along the cosmic highway I am totally in charge of (and totally to blame for) all the choices my kids are making and will make.
 . 
And responsible, of course, for all the rest, now and forever after. Are my parents happy? Is my wife fulfilled? Are my grandkids smart? Is there crabgrass in the flower bed? (Well, maybe I am responsible for that one.) Don’t worry, I am not poised here to write an article titled Everything That Would Have Been Better if I Were Better. That’s between me and 4 AM.
 . 
Instead, I’m attempting a more compelling practice. A practice without textbooks or certification exams. One that requires nothing but offers everything. A practice never free from pain but sometimes tinged with joy. All that this practice endeavors is to prod a slight change in phraseology, poke a minor shift in frame of reference. When I learn of your misfortune, when you tell me about your pain, when I recognize that you are suffering, I will try my best not to say to myself I’m glad that isn’t me, and instead I will say, That is me.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Xing
 . 
I don’t know how I brought a child
into the world when I can’t reconcile
 . 
if crashing a car and a friend’s skull
is karmic debt created
 . 
or payment for a past immoral act.
I open doors and say thank you and do not try
 . 
to behave in a way I cannot afford.
There’s no barometer, no way to know
 . 
if the pendulum is swinging
away or toward, how many pay-it-forwards it takes
 . 
before I break even at the gambling table.
I cold blend in with the pure
 . 
if it weren’t for the scars that don’t fade
no matter how many turtles I save,
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so am I all that surprised
when my little boy tells me
 . 
of his palpable fear
to cross the street.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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Sostenuto – a musical notation indicating a passage sustained to the utmost. Unrelenting. Imagine a violin’s piercing note, almost impossibly high and rising, horsehair glissando across the E-string. Now it’s joined in harmony by the A-string, discordant, the two dancing and warring with each other. They weave pitch and volume but never rest, sostenuto. You lean forward on the edge of your hard seat, your teeth are on edge, you want, you need, you crave desperately some resolution.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder sustains tension throughout sixty-four pages to the ultimate climax of Anything That Happens. Her story is too piercing: one tastes blood and tears. She lives every moment with that high, sharp note, days and years of guilt and pain – she has irretrievably damaged her friend – and then also weaves discordant disharmonies from her cold relationship with her mother and her non-relationship with her father. More than once I had to lay the book aside and breathe deeply to slow my pounding heart.
 . 
And more than once I resisted the urge to flip pages to the end. Who doesn’t crave resolution? What follows in this post today is the book’s penultimate poem. Some hurt can never be removed. No one can return to the moment before anything happens. Scars are just that, permanent marks and reminders of pain. How do any of us go on living? How? I invite you to enter the music of this book, its atonality and discord, one poem after another, until you reach its final page.
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❦
 . 
Anything That Happens by Cheryl Wilder is a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection and is available at Press 53. Among other awards, the book was a finalist for the 2022 Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society; read an additional poem from the collection and celebrate 90 years of NCPS HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Home Safe
 . 
Friends visit the hospital
where I am not wanted. It’s just as well
 . 
that I stay in bed, carve poplar
into a shield I can place between
 . 
myself and others, learn you wake
from a coma by the drop
 . 
of my manslaughter charge. Years pass
before I hear your voice again,
 . 
asking me to lunch over the phone, your mother
telling me I am only allowed in her home
 . 
because you found my number
on your own. You reach for my arm
 . 
to steady your walk, lean close
to see me in focus, your smile wide
 . 
on one side of your face, brightened even more
at the restaurant when you flirt with the waiter.
 . 
That is enough, to see a glimpse of the friend
I once knew, but then you reach cross the table
 . 
for my hands, look at me to say
what you defied your mother to say,
 . 
It’s not your fault. Over and again,
I forgive you. You can’t remember
 . 
the night I cannot forget, but you know
your words are my salvation.
 . 
There is no talk of next time.
You get out of the car and walk
 . 
into the house, back to your mother
who can breathe once again.
 . 
Cheryl Wilder
from Anything That Happens, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2021.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2017-03-06a
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Generosity

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 29, 2024| 8 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Terri Kirby Erickson]
 . 
In the Midst of Grief, a Heron
 . 
Healing begins with the blue heron hunting
in the frigid water of a shallow pond.
 . 
Wings folded, neck tucked into its feathered
breast, it stands motionless in a shelter
 . 
made of branches, alone save for its shadow.
What would it hurt to loosen our grip
 . 
on grief? To allow the soft gray-blue
of a heron’s body to soothe our eyes, tired
 . 
of shedding tears? This day will never come
again and the heron will soon fly. Already,
 . 
the light is fading, taking with it all the time
that has ever passed. Let this peace soak
 . 
into our skin like medicine, remain with us
long after the heron is gone.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from Night Talks, New & Selected Poems, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Mike and Johnny Slattery would have been there, from three doors down on Marcia Road. My little brother Bobby, of course. I can picture the house right now as if standing there, the shape of our living room in that L-shaped ranch in the square-grid new-built neighborhood in Memphis. There’s the door that leads into Mom’s kitchen, to the right the little hallway to the front door, outside another ten steps to the carport and driveway where we played marbles or rode our bikes down to the street. Beside me is the corner cupboard Nana gave us, before me the cherry table Dad broke last year when he fell.
 . 
Most everything else from my nine-year old birthday party has faded. How many other boys Mom invited and gathered in from the homes around, what kind of cake, the candles and singing – all now clouded and indistinct.
 . 
One moment, though, remains untarnished. It’s been polished these sixty years hence by recollection and reflection. Mom thought to include one boy the rest of us didn’t play with very often. Maybe there was something a little different about him. To this day I can’t tell you his name. As the other boys present their gifts, brightly wrapped in colorful paper, he gives me a big smile and hands me his – a lump of crumpled tin foil. I peel it apart. Inside are six quarters.
 . 
I don’t remember any of the other presents I received that day. Why has this one stuck with me? I can testify I was surely no less selfish and self-absorbed than any other nine-year old, but with some vague child’s awareness I realized in that moment the boy was giving me all he had. Maybe he didn’t have a mom with time to go to the store or wrap a present. Maybe he’d never been invited to a birthday party. Today, writing these lines, I still feel a strange heaviness when I think about his gesture, a forlorn sadness but also a rich touch of awe and gratitude.
 . 
That smile – he was so happy to hand me that gift. From him to me. Thank you, thank you, little boy.
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Letter
 . 
Northing is ordinary – not condensation on a pane
of glass – that streak of sunlight, yellow
as lemons, in the neighbor’s backyard. Trees
 . 
are rustling tender new leaves, and our lawn
is as thick as a wool rug. Even the scent of coffee
 . 
wafting from the kitchen is a miracle,
a woman walking her little dog down the sidewalk,
its leash as taught as rigging. Yet, every house
 . 
hides something that hurts, even as we call to one
another, good morning, good morning –
 . 
our faces open as a letter lying on a table, the kind
that makes our hands shake when we find it
in the mailbox, that we only read once.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from Night Talks, New & Selected Poems, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
We can be generous giving money and things, and this week in the USA we generously give thanks, but where else does generosity slip in? Generous with advice, oh my yes aren’t we all, and woe to those who don’t take it. Generous with encouragement and acceptance, and who gets to decide what’s worthy of encouragement and what acceptable? Apparently it’s actually quite easy to be giving without being generous at all. We’ve had to make a rule at our house to keep the after-school peace: Pappy doesn’t try to eat Amelia’s snacks. Last week, though, Amelia had a sweet she really wanted to finish herself but offered me a bite. Generosity – it doesn’t have much to do with deserving or keeping score; it has more to do with making sacrifices and sharing the joy.
 . 
I think of myself as a reasonably generous person, and then I read Terri Kirby Erickson’s poetry. These people, these moments remembered and shared, these talks over breakfast or long into the night that leave each speaker that much richer, these also leave me richer, fuller, more human. In Night Talks, Terri presents about sixty new poems along with grateful selections from her six previous books, combined and swirled like the best layer cake you ever set fork to, perfect for morning on the porch with coffee or with evening lamplight leaning back into the sofa.
 . 
After returning to this book over and over, I can finally name the spirit that suffuses Terri’s work and that warms the reader – generosity. There is harm and hazard in Terri’s writer’s life, there is grief and loss and no denying them. These poems look into the darkness and discover light, even if only the pinpricks of stars overhead. These poems never overlook a radiant dawn – they always expect it. And it doesn’t hurt a bit that Terri is the impresario of image, the titan of the turn of phrase: summer wants [to] / hitch a ride on the back of a broad-winged hawk / to places where the stars feel like chips of ice / sliding down September’s throat.
 . 
How does her poetry restore and replenish its deeply generous spirit on every new page? Try on this bit of spiritual etymology: From gratitude comes generosity; from generosity comes giving. With recollection and reflection, let me polish up my gratitude. Let’s see where it take me.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Moon Walk
++++ for my brother
 . 
Sunburned, bellies full of fried pompano, sweet
corn, and garden tomatoes purchased at a roadside
stand manned by a farmer with more fingers than
teeth—my family huddled around a rented black
and white TV set the shape and size of a two-slot
toaster, watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
hop like bunnies on the rough surface of the same
waxing moon that shone through our beach cottage
windows. I was eleven years old, bucktoothed and
long-legged—my brother a year younger and, most
days, followed his big sister like Mercury orbiting
the sun. Mom and Dad sat side by side on the faux
leather, sand-dusted couch, and Grandma, never one
to hold still for long, stood by her grandson’s hard-
backed chair, her hair a nimbus of silver from the soft
glow of a television screen where a miracle unfolded
before our eyes. But grown men wearing fishbowls
on their heads, bouncing from one crater to the next,
seemed less real to my brother and me than Saturday
morning cartoons. And all the while, we could hear
waves slapping the surf and wind whipping across
the dunes—and the taste on every tongue was salt
and more salt. So when I picture the summer of ’69
at Long Beach, North Carolina, as history rolled out
the red carpet leading to a future none of us could
foresee, my heart breaks like an egg against the rim
of what comes next. But let’s pretend for the length
of this poem, that my brother’s blood remains safe
inside his veins, Grandma’s darkening mole as benign
as a monastery full of monks, and our parents, unable
to imagine the depth and breadth of grief. Here, there
is only goodness and mercy, the light of a million stars,
and the moon close enough now for anyone to touch.
 . 
Terri Kirby Erickson
from Night Talks, New & Selected Poems, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2023
 . 
❦
 . 
Night Talks, New & Selected Poems, by Terri Kirby Erickson, is available at Press 53 in Winston-Salem NC along with five other collections by Terri.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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