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Posts Tagged ‘nature photography’

Language?

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2023| 9 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by David Radavich]
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Turtle
 . 
Its stomach brushes ground
as by long acquaintance,
 . 
one foot then another, one leaf,
slow digestion, eyes alert
 . 
like high-beams
in the wind-swept night,
 . 
hard against the air yet telling
stories as a stained-glass
 . 
window, victory
over hastening death,
 . 
comrade of dust and mud
and golden squares like armor
 . 
glinting whenever sun
arcs its sacrifice –
 . 
just so I think of you
unfolding a yellowed piece
 . 
of paper, words
you never meant to say
 . 
crawling their careful
way into my bone-frame,
 . 
softer than
the moon starting
 . 
to curl
into dawn
 . 
David Radavich
from Canonicals – Love’s Hours
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At 17 she had a boyfriend (briefly) whose language she did not speak. The two would sit at the back of the bus through the turns and hesitations of the clamorous diesel-fumed city and communicate with their lips, although words are not what passed between them. When they came up for breath it was no use to tell him about the menacing gothic facade they were passing or comment on the uniformed school children being led across the bridge. He would stare at her and she back at him until they reached her stop. Come inside? What am I saying, and what do you think I mean? Well,  Tschuβ until tomorrow after school.
 . 
Some would say that no boy and girl at 17 ever speak the same language. Some say man and woman never at any age. Cynics. Nevertheless, when the girl’s best friend, who commanded some phrases the boy could grasp, had to call him one evening to convey a final message from the girl – angry? sad? frustrated? – and cancel any further bus rides, she still could never quite understand how it all had gone so wrong. An inter-language dictionary proved no help at all. Decades later she would still wake at 3 AM and feel the fool, although a few latent hippocampal neurons, hers and no doubt his as well, continued to fire, “What if? What if?” One tattered shred of recollection with lint of vocabulary she could have pieced together if she had tried still labored to remind her of this: when they had turned toward each other and he placed his hand at her neck, fingers in her soft short hair, they had seemed to understand each other well enough.
 . 
❦
 . 
Time is both a bewildering tangle and a firm reassurance in these poems by David Radavich from Canonicals – Love’s Hours. It is a book of hours – matins to vespers – but also a book of days and years. The images can be elusive, like moonlight through restless leaves, yet remain rich in their enticement. And what message does this subtle, earthbound, exalted language, this language both  precise and intangible, what does it desire to convey? The object, the “you,” is it a focus for affection and gratitude or a saving grace always just beyond reach? Each word lovingly selected, placed, ordered: these poems understand you, the reader, and they invite you with all hopefulness and promise to understand them.
 . 
Canonicals  – Love’s Hours by David Radavich, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY. © 2019 [author biography and book purchase HERE]
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Argus
 . 
Quietly, quietly
dawn takes its place
 . 
among the world’s
elements –
 . 
There will be rapes today,
and military coups,
 . 
also gay
birthdays, painful
 . 
dyings and forlorn lovers
discovering their first infatuation
 . 
with another body.
 . 
Let me be there for it all,
all seasons, all temperaments
 . 
seeing
the round circus
 . 
black and gold as autumn
spinning into night
 . 
love turning
a corner
 . 
into open doors
that lead to bright air
 . 
blowing
many leaves
 . 
David Radavich
from Canonicals – Love’s Hours
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Cyclical
 . 
To rediscover.
 . 
To find again what
has been lost
for more than thirty years.
 . 
A stolen ring
on someone else’s
hand, gold around a gun
 . 
or maybe you
clutching my heart
like a bandit.
 . 
In any case
 . 
it reappears, this missing
self, this jewel tossed
in some closet,
 . 
the world turns
so that China ends up
 . 
and we are land
at the sphere’s bottom
 . 
rediscovering what
 . 
has been lost by many others
and found again like
 . 
sunrise,
like buds breaking.
 . 
David Radavich
from Canonicals – Love’s Hours
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
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Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
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Bright and Brighter

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on October 6, 2023| 9 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Linda Allardt]
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Rx
 . 
Spend more time looking into woods
watching the black squirrel
chasing the sparrows off his branch.
 . 
Get to know the stranger your friends know,
the one you can only see in snapshots,
the profile they know as you.
 . 
Smile in your sleep and wake not knowing why
like a writer trying to remember
that perfect lost line.
 . 
Consider the judgement of trees
branching, dividing to hold up their leaves
to all available sun.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
For now we see as in a dim mirror, but then face to face.
Apostle Paul to the believers at Corinth
 . 
Piedmont prairie restoration – Land Conservancy riparian easements protect the Mitchell River here in Surry County. Might this be how the Blue Ridge foothills appeared before tobacco and soybeans? Mitigation suggests alternate water sources to keep cattle out of creeks and plowing and planting practices that reduce runoff; restoration envisions a renewed and brighter landscape. A few years ago, Linda and I joined a guided hike to see the autumn butterflies attracted to milkweed, thistle, yellow asters in the newly planted prarie. We also discovered a former cow pasture converted to native bunchgrass: redtop, foxtail, bluestem. Startling diversity and color. The brightest of mornings.
 . 
Here we are on an unmarked trail that leads through tall flowers, seedheads, leaping and flying things, then gently on downslope until we reach the South Fork of the Mitchell. The overshaded water is so fresh and clear we imagine we might count every dapple on a brook trout’s flank. We continue downstream in twos and threes past riffles, rainbows of polished riverstones, and sweet bank vegetation toward the meeting of mountain streams. Cool riverbreath, talkative watercourse, whispering hikers – now we reach the confluence.
 . 
What is this magic, this mystery suddenly revealed? As the clear South Fork stream merges with the main channel, we perceive it dull and sluggish compared to the crystalline purity of the Mitchell it now encounters. Even the bright water we’ve followed is overshadowed by the brighter. We have looked through the flow to its bank and bed and been blind to the vestige of silt it still carries. At the confluence one’s eyes are opened to one’s true nature.
 . 
❦
 . 
The poems of Linda Allardt’s At the Confluence are deep and still as a dark glade with its secretive woodland stream. Linda wrote these between her eighty-sixth and ninety-third years, the final decade of a long life as writer and teacher, and her friend and student Kathleen A. Wakefield collected this volume for publication. Linda moves from the poet’s constant question, “Why am I here?” to the even more piercing question, “Why am I still here?”
 . 
How to reply? The poems themselves are their answer. I count the years from the stumps in the yard . . . in the things that are gone. . . . Then I count what still stands. Each of the short poems is an observation and a contemplation. Oh yes, a long life must heft its burden of regrets: How many mea culpas must be said . . . Wasn’t there, once, the right question, / and the right answer to it? But astounding as it may seem, even written in one’s ninth decade, this is not a book of looking back but of looking forward. And even more, a book that in looking outward looks within. May each of us look past the dark swirl we carry to glimpse the bright truth that is our nature.
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❦
 . 
 . 
[Order At the Confluence from FootHills Publishing HERE]
[Kathleen Wakefield would appreciate your reactions to these poems by her friend; you can reach her at COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM]
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Retrieval
 . 
So much is hidden,
what’s past forgotten
or in its slow retrieval rewritten.
What we think we know
is lost in the telling.
 . 
Yet echoes of half forgotten lines
like wind in the wiring
remind us of words once loved
and only half forgotten.
Lines we may have read somewhere,
or written.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In Late November
 . 
I said to the trees, Let go
but the wind-lashed leaves hung on.
I asked them why.
The trees said, You let go,
but I hung on at 93,
knowing no more than the leaves
what handclasp holds us here.
 . 
Linda Allardt
from At the Confluence, FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY. © 2023
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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 . 
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2016-10-17b Doughton Park Tree

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Neck and Neck

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , on September 15, 2023| 4 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Jan LaPerle]
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Cupboard
 . 
One day I decide I’ll do something
good for people,
but I forget, then I nap.
My daughter wants to make
lemon cake so we do that.
I stand on the stool
and begin this great hunt
for poppy seeds.
Hours pass, and I’m on my tiptoes.
I stop searching for a minute to listen
to the wind. The branches snapping.
My daughter ran off agin to her swing,
her swing tied to the branch
of the tree she climbs,
the tree run through with electric wires
in the yard she flies her kite in.
She flies it high as the cell tower.
Her dragon kite breathing fire.
Her dragon kite headed in a nosedive
straight into those electric lines.
I can’t do anything about anything.
I’m trapped in the cupboard
forgetting what I’m searching for.
I dust the spice tops; they go on forever.
My hair too tight in its bobby pins.
Here as good as any place to pray.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The dark and the light are neck and neck again. When dark creeps in the light just doesn’t seem to have much of a chance. This is a close as we come to living dangerously – taking a walk in the woods on an afternoon that promises thunderstorms. Today Linda and I are at Friendship Trail, part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail east of town. Such a lovely name – almost no one walks here but when we do cross paths the others always smile. Perhaps they’re filled with the same thoughts as the two of us: cool shade, gentle slopes, chuckling creek. Green welcome.
 . 
Only a lumpy heap of black sky to the north, that’s all we could see from the parking lot. For the moment sun slants through the pines and tuliptrees. Cicadas sing. Into our third mile, though, shadows begin to deepen and the leaves get nervous. We can still see blinks of blue straight up through the branches but dark is moving in, shouldering it all aside. A stick drops from height to land at my feet. Will a widow-maker be next?
 . 
What gives dark its edge? Why its power to blot out a cheery afternoon and replace it with foreboding? Dark needn’t even knock yet I open the door to it.
 . 
Dark 4 AM’s are worst although understandable: the hour when the soul’s earthly tether / gently uncoils its smoky grasp / as tenuous as breath.* If I awaken at such an hour I immediately implore myself, “Don’t think, don’t think of . . . ,” but so swiftly the dark lines up its charges, some sharp as yesterday, some rank with decades, some uncertain ever to arrive at all but all too easily imagined. Dark loves the quiet unprotected moment.
 . 
But why, then, into light and airy freedom of mind is dark also able to intrude? I discover myself on a rural highway, green tunnel and morning dew, but instead of anticipating certain joy around the next bend I am reliving random moments of my own stupidity or, worse, recreating injuries and insults in some delusion that this heaps coals upon the heads of my enemies. Not Buddha but someone apparently equally enlightened said that to hold a grudge is to drink poison while imagining it will kill your foes. Here I am fueling the dark with anti-matter I’ve brought to the bonfire myself. This negativity, what could be more precisely the opposite of experiencing life in the moment? I open dark’s door myself.
 . 
Take a deep breath. Give my heart a good airing. No blame, no shame, just look straight up through the branches and accept what you see. Gray now, but not black. Threatening gusts have settled back to cooling breeze; just a few cold drops on my neck and no more. Here is the edge of the woods, the field, our car up ahead. Linda and I say, as we tend to, “Well, we carried our umbrellas and that’s what kept it from raining on us.” For a stretch it seemed neck and neck, but even so this hour has been full of green welcome. If at this moment we were instead dripping, shoes aslosh, about to shiver, we could still likely bring ourselves to say, even as we are about to now, “That was a wonderful walk.”
 . 
❦
 . 
The dark and the light are neck and neck again. So they seem to be in every poem by Jan LaPerle. Maybe the Land Sings Back is not a book of platitudes and happy endings. In fact, this is the anti-platitude book. But neither do these lines ever surrender to unremitting darkness. Despair dances with hope even if they are both stepping on each other’s feet. Gray sadness cracks and a thin bright line of joy refracts into color down the wall. These poems accept the small daily trials we might think inconsequential as well as the towering existential anxieties we have to admit if we are alive in this century. These poems offer us the chance to share all of these and in doing so they invite us to become more human.
 . 
Many of these poems are constructed as a series of observations. No, not observations, not apart from the experience but within the experience: these poems are a series of lived moments. Our image of the writer – her age and circumstance, her partner and parent relationships, what she fears and what she loves – is not constructed from what we are told or shown but from sharing the experiences as she does. She struggles to find meaning. So do we. She is surprised that a small act can dispel loneliness or that a small memory can carry a huge weight of joy. We experience surprise at the very moment she does. I have been blown through this collection by a wind of anticipation and revelation and promise. At the end I am simply convinced that, even though neck and neck, the dark doesn’t have much of a chance.

 . . 

❦
 . 
Maybe the Land Sings Back, Jan LaPerle, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022. Jan LaPerle lives in Kentucky with her husband and daughter, and is a master sergeant in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox. Galileo Press was founded in 1979 by Julia Wendell and Jack Stephens, now lives in Aiken, South Carolina, and also publishes the journal Free State Review.
 . 
[* from Circadian (Welcome Morning) by Bill Griffin, published 2005 in Bay Leaves by the Poetry Council of North Carolina and collected in Crossing the River, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC. © 2017)]
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 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Dear Tuth Fary
 . 
This is the beginning of my
daughter’s letter, and in it folds
a tiny tooth, small as the foot of the mouse
we caught this morning in a trap
that looks like a hallway to heaven.
The light at the end illuminating a dollop
of peanut butter, heaven enough
for the mouse who was still alive,
still zipping its stringy tail back and forth
across the hardwood. My daughter
and I went outside to set it free, left the tea
warm on the counter, the teabag
with one of those little paper sayings,
The earth laughs in flowers, but there’s no laughing here,
just ice creeping across everything, making us feel
even more zippered-in, my daughter
on the threshold right before the cry.
She could go either way, and this is always
up to me to maneuver. So I make up some life
for this mouse to get back to, some little car,
tiny house, little teacup tinier than a mouse tooth.
Isn’t it all so cute? Isn’t it great, how I can
hold the world in the light like this?
I cannot talk to her about why the mouse
went in there, the temptation, peanut butter
and loneliness, the pinhole of light in all the darkness,
like when she woke in the middle of the night
and came to my door to say, so sweetly, Hi mama,
which I snuffed out quickly with all my middle-aged
darkness. Midnight breath its own nightmare.
In the morning, I go to my coffee, my office
in the attic where I belong, and the squirrels
scrabble across the shingles and we laugh a little,
we being me and the comic part of me that
pops her head through the skylight to talk
to the critters above and below, and I can hear
it all from there. The inconsequential-ness
of my life is a cinch on my heart. The sweetness, too,
of my little girl growing in the most beautiful person
I have ever seen. That’s enough.
The dark and the light are neck and neck again.
I am freezing from my heart up.
I am right here, rooting from the window.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Big Quiet Things
 . 
Forever we remember her
on our way to the coast,
in the back seat, quiet
for a million miles,
watching movies with
headphones on and
then, as if a word were
a thing, as if quiet
were an ocean,
and out of it: CRAB!
And years now later,
my husband can say it
or I can say it,
and we are warmed together
even when all around us,
sinking us, pulling us under,
a riptide. And it feels
impossible. And there’s
nothing to hold onto.
Silence for a million miles.
Then out of it
a word, and then more where
that one came from,
all washing up, and the sun
warm, the sand
here with us,
waiting with us.
 . 
Jan LaPerle
from Maybe the Land Sings Back, Galileo Press, Aiken, SC. © 2022
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

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