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Dream Time

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, family, How to Cut a Woman in Half, imagery, Janis Harrington, nature photography, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 24, 2025| 8 Comments »

[with poems by Janis Harrington]

Suicidal Ideation

Think of dark starlings, each a ringleader,

invading your hanging backyard feeder.

Magnets for their kind, they muster, rout

more timid species from seed and suit.

Fast and fertile breeders, they multiply,

a flock of hundred swells to thousands.

Screeching and squawking rapacious hoodlums,

they give no quarter and sing no harmony,

waging war with incessant cacophony.

No calm, no détente; nonstop attack.

In waves, like bombers, they dive and peck.

Wing to wing, they block sun, moon, stars, finally

blot out all light, transforming noon to midnight.

No escape. a full eclipse of hope.

Janis Harrington

❦ ❦ ❦

Life is a dream. / You are the projector. You are the screen.

Dad is sitting at the new table beside the front window. The sun has settled; the ocean is pink and purple, at rest. Someone has helped Dad transfer into an upholstered chair and pushed his wheelchair into a corner. He is talking with his youngest grandchild while they work a puzzle. Everyone has arrived. Everyone surrounds him.

This is the image I create and cultivate after hanging up the phone. Bob has called to assure me that their eight-hour drive to the coast presented only surmountable obstacles. Now they’ll spend a week at the beach house celebrating Dad’s 99th birthday. Dad has been longing to be there for a year. He started asking me how soon he could go even before Mom’s memorial service last September.

Last night Linda and I argued about a related family wrangle. She was angry at the person sharpening their claws. I told her it was bedtime and I was determined to put conflict out of my mind for eight hours. Let dreams sort it. Of course, I then woke at 3:00 and ruminated for an hour or two. Isn’t this supposed to be the week of no worries, Dad safe in the arms of my brother and his family? After a year of all manner of arrangements, finagles, and complications, after each nurse’s phone call and the anticipation of the next one, aren’t I allowed to flip the ON switch for peace?

What the hell does that even mean, I am the screen and the projector? That I alone make my life what it is? Or that I imagine I do? In dreams the tangle of images and juxtapositions is supposedly the effort by my unconscious to shuffle into some semblance of meaning all my disparate and disconnected moments. Perhaps Dad won’t scuffle out of an unfamiliar bed after midnight and break his hip. Perhaps the worst is not always just about to happen. Scientists have discovered through meticulous testing and observation that there are indeed other species besides Homo sapiens that can imagine and anticipate the future. God help them.

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How to Cut a Woman in Half

Fate, a cruel magician, vanishes her husband,

leaving her table with half as many plates,

shower rack missing half its towels,

bed half empty. The trick: after the blade falls,

she shrinks herself into half of her former life.

But is he truly absent? She wills

each day’s crawling hours to end, certain

he waits in sleep’s tempting garden –

there’s no hope of persuading her

that dreams are merely pan’s sleight of hand.

Eventually, she will emerge on stage,

appearing unharmed, performance complete.

Does it matter what is real or illusion if,

when she steps from grief’s box, she feels whole?

Janis Harrington

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Solo

The Buddhist acupuncturist, gazing beyond

the veil, report that Nick at last, has shed

earth’s weight. His soul, presently in the astral state,

has embraced its destiny – like the wayward

gray whale, whose biological mandate

to migrate finally required

his recent swim from bay to open ocean.

Annie’s turn, now, to exit sorrow’s cul-de-sac,

navigate rocky channels to new seas,

resisting the sirens’ call of what used to be,

accepting she and Nick must make solo passages:

his voyage, to collective consciousness,

without form or visible home;

hers, to find a port in life’s physical realm.

Janis Harrington

❦ ❦ ❦

This sonnet sequence by Janis Harrington is mournful, painful, piercing. It reveals every face of suffering but also every facet needed for healing. How to cut a woman in half? Divide her from the person she loves most dearly. Dissect away with blunt shears half of her being, her essence. How to put her back together? That is a long and painful process and no certain sunrise on the horizon, although a sister is required and is present. I treasure the metaphor nearing the book’s final pages: Together, we flew close to grief’s center, / our wings sturdier than wax and feather.

How to Cut a Woman in Half was finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award and is available HERE. Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane (St. Andrews University Press © 2017) won the Lena M. Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Discover more about Janis HERE.

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Acroyoga

Flex your trust muscle, the instructor advises,

making us giggle. Annie and I alternate

as flyer or base, each of us able

to bear a sister’s weight. Now, my back on the mat,

our hands clasped, my feet supporting her thighs,

I straighten my legs to ninety degrees –

my turn to hold her aloft. Acrobat of strength

and grace, she soars, escaping sorrow’s labyrinth.

Her liberty has freed me. Being her spotter,

daily witness to her reckoning with loss,

released my heart’s stubborn resistance

to Pete’s fate, long mourning of his absence.

Together, we flew close to grief’s center,

our wings sturdier than wax and feather.

Janis Harrington

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Time’s Shift

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 17, 2025| 5 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Crow cosmogony

The day we made the world, scattered

shattered sand across the deep

steeps and hollows of the sea,

we were playing with chance,

a stance few other gods admired.

We retired then from creation and let things

sing as they would, go

to whatever end luck called good.

We could, and did, breath in a platypus here,

a shearwater there – evolution

our solution to dogma and fate,

the weight of always being in charge

of stars, shoals, plague, all that –

but by and large, we let go, let

sweat and thought fall away,

stray like questing possums

or blossoms of blown snow.

So it was. We didn’t worry how

our sowing would grow. We went back

to hacking with our thick

black bills at death and waste, harrying

carrion, even as the dead

bled ever more numerous over the new

true-straight roads, here

where we shaped the bright turns

and returns of the world, invited

night in: do that, and you get

what you get. Despised

as flies, we pick through pale grass

for carcasses gone flat and dry;

we rise under your very wheels

from meals scant and cold, bring

strings of gut back to our young. But so

goes the world, when you let it go,

throw yourself in its rolling motion, chance

chance: we live on broken squirrels

in the world we made this way.

Catherine Carter

❦ ❦ ❦

The postmark is 03-09-97. Linda found the torn envelope, letter inside, at the bottom of a box of mementos she’s still sorting from her parents’ home after their deaths over a decade ago. Dear Dad . . . It’s me writing to my father-in-law, the nuclear physicist. I’ve got an idea for a new story and I need your help. Dad French and I would sometimes share first drafts with each other, his hard science fiction that could use a cool breath or two of metaphor, my airy prose in desperate need of some fact checking. So here’s my pitch:

Imagine a craft traveling to Proxima Centauri, 4.25 light-years away. It’s under a constant acceleration of 2G for the first half of the voyage, then 2G deceleration for the second half. What would be its peak velocity at the mid-point? And how much time will pass for the voyagers relative to earth time?

Relative is the operative word. Dad French was an Einsteinian guru. His favorite Saturday afternoon pastime was to lean back on the couch with a big yellow legal pad and work through the equations of Special Relativity. He felt that he had identified a flaw and was determined to elucidate (from the Latin, “bring it into the light”). The most I could understand from his explanations of time dilation is that any object, whether charged particle or self-aware being, as it approaches the speed of light experiences a slowdown in the passage of time. To me on that spaceship there’s no difference in the ticking of my clock, but if my buddy back on earth could listen in he’d hear an expanding silence between each tick and the next.

But big deal. Who hasn’t felt time speed up or slow down in certain situations? Man, last week was so busy it just flew by. – or – I feel like I’ve been sitting in this waiting room for a week. We human beings are just rubbish at time. If you asked that charged particle, it would know to the femtosecond how long since it got spat out of the cyclotron. My perception of time, though, is all tangled with context and saturated with subconscious. Don’t even ask me how long I’ve been sitting here at this keyboard, much less whether a certain something happened five years ago or ten.

Which is why, when I wake up in the dark, I avoid looking at the clock. If I should still happen to be lying there with my brain in fifth gear when light begins to seep around the shades, when any hope of re-entry into the land of Nod is laughable, then I don’t want to know how long it’s been. I don’t want to know that I’ve just spent two hours on this inventory of all my faults and failings. Surely no more than a handful of ticks. Grant me the bliss of imagining I’m half way to Proxima Centauri at nine-tenths the speed of light and I have all the time in the universe.

❦

Oh, and here is what else I found in that old envelope along with the letter: a Post It stuck to the page with these lines in Dad French’s handwriting.

Park French

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Choptank bluegills take part

in the creation of the world

You couldn’t say bluegills create the stream.

Torn from the stream, they choke

on blazing air. And yet. Those nests,

those few dozen shallow divots together

pocking the creek bottom in dimples

rich with sunfish generations: changing

creekbed, reshaping foundation.

That steady fan-flow of air-

bearing water over eggs settled among

the pebbles, ever so slightly changing

the river’s braiding and unbraiding. That labor

of life: the work to work

with the current as it is and yet

to change it just enough, to manifest

a place a little better for bluegills, co-creating

the world in concert with oxygen exchange,

tectonic motion, that smashed and gash-

edged hubcap pinning down an immortal

plastic bag, the gravity of the moon, whirligig

beetles inscribing creek-skin with runes

written in water, whatever God you say. Flood

of protestors in the street’s torrent, choking

on blazing air. A woman stirring cut

onions over heat, changing them just enough

to turn their burning tears to something

a little more sweet. Fingers moving the pen, the keys,

the lever, and the air and ground

of our lives ever so slightly shifting

in response, recreated (ever so slightly) anew.

The fearful fact: it matters what you do.

Catherine Carter

❦ ❦ ❦

What is left for us to believe in? What even matters? When hate is the day’s currency, those who can’t bring themselves to live on hate are emptied and cast aside. As if! Whatever. It’s all just relative, anyway. But stone is still stone, underfoot, under earth, under all, and if you rub the lodestone along the needle and suspend it by a thread, it will still swing north.

And so these poems. Crows and bluegills continue to create the universe and stirring onions in a skillet continues to make the world just that much sweeter. There is still truth you can pin down, categorize, calculate, and right alongside that truth is the truth of breath, discovery, awe. I am not afraid to say it, Catherine: you make me believe that even I matter. How could any of us walk through a world that smells a little of skunk; feel sun on our face while the grass turns that sun into sugar; tremble one moment at the closeness of death and the next moment laugh as life surprises us; travel these lines of verse into strange realms and incantations that transform into our own familiar muscle and blood and mind; how could we do all this and not discover that we matter and that this planet we love matters?

I believe. That there is still hope for us all. And for all that surrounds us.

❦

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

If you read one book of poetry this year, make it By Stone and Needle. These poems are comforting and harrowing, enlivening and enlightening. They are true.

I featured two additional poems from the collection at last weeks posting (October 10, 2025).

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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.

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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).

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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