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Chain

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 24, 2023| 15 Comments »

[poems from Word and Witness: A. R. Ammons, Julie Suk, Peter Makuck]

Carnage ensues at the table while I make coffee. As all the other animals look on in abject silence, large plush Starfish (carnivore, you know) has captured Baby Chick and is eating him with authentic suck-the-juice-right-out-of-you sound effects.

I remark that I’m going to be sad to miss little yellow Chicky. My grandson looks up, all innocence, and simply reminds me, “That’s just the way the food chain works.”

So it must be. Nine years before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Alfred Lord Tennyson had already warned us (“she” being Nature, “types” being species):

. . .
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

+++++ from In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850)

Shall we weep for Baby Chick? For the extinctions accelerating around us? For ourselves, our loss? A few years back I was leading a group of Junior Highs on a nature walk when we spotted a marvelously large spider shuffling along the path ahead of us. When we reached it, though, we found it was not the legs of the spider that were walking but the legs of the pint-sized wasp that had stung and paralyzed it and now dragged it to a favorable spot for egg laying. In an instant the spider transformed from an object of fear and loathing to a spike of compassion in our hearts.

This week a very talkative red shouldered hawk is haunting the woods out back. No coincidence: that’s where the bird feeders hang. We hope he’s eyeing the squirrels – there are more than enough squirrels, eat all you want Sir Hawk. And the mice that come for the seeds dropped to the ground from the feeders, and then store them in our basement, yes, eat them, too. But please, not the cute chipmunk who hides in the ivy or the finches we love. Alas, I guess we don’t get to choose. That’s just how the food chain works.

But wait – do all our choices come to nothing? Our love, our suffering of countless ills, our battles for the True and Just – is the end of all these to be blown to desert dust? Can’t we choose to engage with embattled Nature? Can we reduce our relentless consumption of the planet, choose leaders of vision and intelligence, make peace with our brothers and sisters? How lengthy shall I extend this list? Shall we abandon hope and just accept our place in the food chain while the warming earth devours us?

If a spider can inspire a moment of compassion in a 13-year old, I will have to accede that there may yet be hope for our species.

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The Yucca Moth

++ The yucca clump
is blooming,
++ tall sturdy spears
spangling into bells of light,
++ green
in the white blooms
++ faint as a memory of mint.

I raid
++ a bloom,
spread the hung petals out,
++ and, surprised he is not
a bloom-part, find
++ a moth inside, the exact color,
the bloom his daylight port or cove:

though time comes
++ and goes and troubles
are unlessened,
++ the yucca is lifting temples
of bloom: from the night
++ of our dark flights, can
we go in to heal, live
++ out in white-green shade
the radiant, white, hanging day?

A. R. Ammons
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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This week a friend asked me to send him the table of contents of Word and Witness for a project on biodiversity he’s considering The book was published by the North Carolina Poetry Society in 1999 and edited by Sally Buckner with an afterword by Fred Chappell, who was NC Poet Laureate at the time. It spans the full 20th Century of North Carolina poetry and poets, and as I was scanning the TOC to email my friend a PDF, I re-discovered the names of so many folks who have inspired and befriended me over the last two decades.

Poetry continues to thrive in “the writingest state.” Word and Witness is 261 pages; it would be a real challenge to prepare Volume II for just the first quarter of the 21st Century and limit it to that length. I believe it is still possible to purchase a copy from Carolina Academic Press. You need to get yourself one.

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Waiting for the Storyteller

Once more we wait for the storyteller
to step into the margin and reveal intentions:
why the first letter flowered,
spiraling down the page with intricate designs,
the hand translating what the tongue began.

Clues drop, mostly forgotten,
so on and so on stacked like bricks,
crumbling when we look back,
a voice once close now a stranger.

All through the book we wild-guess the villain,
so deceived by this one or that
we look for reprieve, a surprise ending,
the page turning to a house in the woods,
dogs locked up, gun put a way.

In the still forest of words,
where the hidden appears in its season,
hills darken and move in.
Like lean horses that have rocked a long way home,
they circle the pool of our hands.
A deer riffles through leaves, then a bird
sings begin again, begin again.

Julie Suk
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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Dogwood Again

Home from college, I’d leave my reading,
climb the hill through trees behind the house,
listen to a rough wind suffer through
new leaves and, too aware of myself, ask why?

The answer could have been stone wall,
wind or some other words. In April, our house
lived in the light of those first white petals
and now I think more about hows than whys –

How, whenever we fished at Pond Meadow,
my father dug a small one up, carefully
wrapped the rootball in burlap, and trucked it
home until our hard blazed white all around,

and how, at Easter, those nighttime blossoms
seemed like hundred of fluttering white wings.
Again that tree goes into the dark loaded
with envy, those leaves full of light not fading.

And this morning, a fogbright air presses
against the blank white pane and would have us
see the way mist burns from within, shimmers,
slowly parts, and flares upon an even whiter tree,

tinged now with orange, and how a soft fire
runs to the farthest cluster of cross-like petals,
each haloed with clear air, finely revealed.

Peter Makuck
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

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Bios adapted in part from Word and Witness:

After growing up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) received a degree from Wake Forest College, and served as an elementary school principal, but he lived most of his adult life outside his native state. His interest in writing developed during long hours aboard ship when he served a term of duty with the Navy. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he was ultimately Goldwin Smith Professor of English. Among his many honors are the Bollingen Prize, the national Book award (twice), the MacArthur Fellowship, and the 1998 Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

A native of Alabama, Julie Suk (b. 1924) has lived for many years in Charlotte, where she worked in a nature museum. In addition to authoring six volumes of her own poetry, she has co-edited (with Anne Newman) Bear Crossings: An Anthology of North American Poets. Her collection The Angel of Obsession won the 1991 University of Arkansas national poetry competition, and in 1993 she won the Bess Hokin Prize given by Poetry magazine. In 2004 Julie received the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College; her book The Dark Takes Aim won the 2003 North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award and The Oscar Arnold Young Award from The Poetry Council of North Carolina.

Among previous occupations, Peter Makuck (b. 1940) lists, “truck driver, painter, mechanic,” but he is best known as writer and as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. Pilgrims won the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 1989. In 2010 Long Lens: New & Selected Poems was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his eight collections of poetry, he has published numerous short stories and essays. Peter has received the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation; a Connecticut native, he has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universite de Soavoie, Chambery, France. He founded Tar River Poetry in 1978 and served as editor until 2006.

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Doughton Park Tree 2021-10-23

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Never Come Down

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2023| 4 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Terry Blackhawk]

Monty and I are trying some new knots, big husky knots, and we’re pretty sure we have it right this time. The stalwart little paratrooper I got for Christmas, his broad red and white plastic parachute and the web of thin strings that fix to his shoulders – they just won’t hold together. Each time we fold the chute just so, roll the trooper carefully so nothing tangles, throw it as hard and as high as we can, but the lines come loose as soon as the plastic banner deploys. Our man has plummeted to his death over and over.

It’s 1965. I’ve only been living in Wilmington, Delaware for a few months; the heritage of where I moved from to get here is firmly affixed in the nickname all the other sixth graders have given me – “Memphis.” My new school might as well be Mars Colony A, so distant it seems from Colonial Elementary. I have four different teachers, most of them are men, and they seem determined to require a boy to think. On this final afternoon of winter break, Monty and I are determined to have our last hour of fun.

The breeze has picked up. Most of the snow has melted but our hands are red and chapped – you can’t tie knots with gloves on. We pull the last string tight, tighter, fold and roll, and we’re ready. I hold the soldier like a grenade, lean back, and lob him straight up with a grunt. At the peak of its arc the little package unrolls; red and white unfurls and fills with evening’s breath. The knots hold.

And the wind takes our paratrooper higher and higher into the east.

Monty and I give chase through backyards and down long sidewalks in our housing development. The parachute dims and shrinks in the distance. We run until our sides ache and the brave soldier is out of sight. Gone. We stop, gasping, and stare into the lowering dusk as lights blink on in windows around us.

I imagine my little man has crossed the Delaware River, surprising people who happen to look up from the railroad yards, the factories and warehouses. He holds his lines tight; he swings and sways. Catching the last light from that high vantage, now he can see the Atlantic. I imagine him never coming down.

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The Woodcock

Weary of the daily terror I turn
to the mystic body of the bird. A woodcock
I found crackling the twigs and ivy,
barely escaped from a cat’s clumsy claws.
I feared for the odd angle of its wing,
the surprised flopping it made there,
but I did not fear the extreme length
of its beak or the eyes popping diametrically
on either side of its head. I loved the feathers’
deckled edges and the light weight it made
as I scooped it up and put it, limpsy and weak,
into an old canvas book bag, and when I
released it from that soft safe space
some time later, out on Belle Isle, I missed it
at once, as one would miss a friend.
It whirred straight up, explosively,
toward freedom on the other side of the river,
its pulse now gone from my hands.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

note: “samples Song of Myself, 10, in which the speaker imagines succoring a runaway slave”

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Sometimes a knot is so twisted and curlicued you can’t make out whether it’s one string or a handful, much less how it all connects. Let’s see, Catherine Carter told me about Katherine Wakefield’s book, which led me to Patricia Hooper, who inspired me to read Terry Blackhawk. Or maybe the lines snake in and out along different paths; maybe I’m leaving out a thread here and there, most likely it goes back way farther even than that. I know, however, that I can count on this – the connections stretch and extend and I’ve not yet reached the end.

Such a warp and weft Terry threads through her book, One Less River. The Detroit River, subtropical shorelines, paths through dunes and forest, paths through myth and memory – the poems take us someplace new with each turning page. But despite shadows and storms these poems don’t cast us alone into dark landscapes. There is light. Light rises from the companionship of solid friends like Whitman and Dickinson, from companionable invitations to partake and be filled of rich intent and novel images. It is possible to wander through this book and be surprised and also reassured. The path will definitely challenge, because living is a challenge and preserving our world is a challenge. At the end we may discover that we are all tied together a little more closely. Our knots are not fetters but the shared bonds of humanness.

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The Extinct Fresh Water Mussels of the Detroit River
+++++++++++++++ for Kathryne Lindberg (1951-2010)

These are gone: the deer-toe maple leaf, the fat
mucket, the snuffbox, the rainbow shell. Here, still,

the rusted manhole cover and the chipping paint,
the lights and arches of the elegant bridge,

all coated no doubt then in ice. Here the breeze,
here the freighters but not the car. Quiet as it’s kept,

it’s no secret the keys were left in the ignition.

Absence makes the fond heart wander, the mind
meander, the river to swallow its flow –

the self-same river, the self-same self, even the one
that knew better, the self that knew better

than to pick up a phony ten-dollar bill folded
to disguise some evangelical come-hither.

Com hither, said the bridge.

Little earwig mussel, pimpleback, northern riffle shell,
something lacy yet along the rim.

In the print gallery a dry-point fox in outline
(“Running Fox,” R. Sintemi, Germany, 1944) floats
as if on the surface of a river, water swelling upward
on the verge of breaking up its lines –

Did you float, dear bat-out-of-hell, dear gnashing teeth –
the pointed ears, the flowing tail outlined on water not water,

on paper not paper, on the not-water before there only was
water, where we are floating now, as over a great uncertainty,
a mirroring surface that hides as much as it reveals.

No more rayed bean, purple warty back, O fragile paper shell –
Where was the artist in 1944? What did he do in 1939?

You would have wanted to know.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

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Again, the Moon

And now the moon, its vitreous pour
so quickly come again
moonstruck moon melon moon

I drive the unfamiliar
town, going where Siri tells me
through unlit streets

I cannot dial back to another
moon, although there have been many –
moons of loss, lists, listing oh the self-
consciousness of the moon

Look at the moon in the sky,
not the one in the lake, says Rumi
The pleasures of heaven are with me
and the pains of hell are with me, says Whitman

So which is the lake and which
the sky? With a moon this bright
I cannot find the stars.

Terry Blackhawk
from One Less River, Mayapple Press, Woodstock NY, © 2019 Terry Blackhawk

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Early Snow

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 25, 2022| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems from Quiet Diamonds
Bob Wickless, Susan Craig, Bill Griffin]

O narrow track, how I have missed you! O wee well trodden way, favorite mile, little path through pasture and wood that my right knee has refused to let me walk for all these weeks, I am so glad to see you again. Last visit you had all but shed your autumn yellows, not to mention cardinalflower reds and pastel meadowbeauties. Now here you are blowing snow across my path.

The season has arrived of whites and browns, feathers and fluff, crowns and rounds – seeds! Hello little calico aster whose name I just learned last summer; now your stems are strung with new stars so fine. Hello crownbeard; petals fallen, you lift your regal head. And hello snowy boneset and thoroughwort; one puff of breeze is all it takes to loft your feathered promises across the meadow.

There is a bare patch below my house beneath the powerline. There is an empty bag in my pocket. You won’t mind, prodigal wingstem, goldenrod, ironweed, if I catch a bit of your seedstuff and carry it home to a new bed? You won’t run short of provender when goldfinches and sparrows come to call. You won’t ever hear me, like some others, name you weeds.

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Prayer in Spring

beginning with a line from Seneca

Not hoping without doubt,
Not doubting without hope,
We enter the slow country
Of change, clad in the garment
Thread through the loom of change,
Woven in green doubt
Though woven in hopes

Greener than any hopes are:
May the clothes of the world
Still fit, in the eye’s mind
And in the mind’s eye, may
Our vision still clear
As the iced eye of the river
Cataracts, loosens, the view

In the breeze of the green flag
That is not failure, in one light
That will melt the white flag
Of surrender – Lord, we had not
Given up though the air had said
Surrender, through the vines, trees
Were all blasted with failure,

Though no light shone
Through the fabric of sky
But one pale and unaccomplished,
Wan, washed out as our vision,
Faded divinity, in the blank
Washed out country called snow,
A world neglected, blue

Now, Lord, even as the sky

Bob Wickless (Reidsville, NC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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Today in Elkin this blowing snow is windborne seeds of last summer’s asters, but inches of the cold frozen sort are accumulating in northeastern Ohio around Lake Erie. Snow belt – that’s where Linda and I met, dated, and graduated from the high school we walked to through slush & drifts. Call off school for a “snow day” in Ohio? Bah! The last time we visited Portage County was for Linda’s birthday six years ago. The old Aurora Country Club had been converted to a nature preserve – how many species of goldenrod filled those reclaimed fairways? The Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area had since 2000 become a National Park; we still talk about the canal trail, every ten meters another chipmunk to chirp and run across our feet.

Northeastern Ohio lives fondly in our hearts. Just up Chillicothe Road from the Cuyahoga and our old school is the village of Gates Mills and The Orchard Street Press, another font of fondness. OSP editor Jack Kristofco published my chapbook Riverstory : Treestory in 2018, so I most certainly love him, but even more I love the anthology his press produces every year, Quiet Diamonds. This year’s collection is deep and various and moving. The poems can be personal and at the same time universal. I find myself leafing back and forth through the book reading each one several times, in a different sequence, discovering new moods with each passage. So many I would love to feature on this page, wonderfulness from poets all over the US, but here I continue my focus on us Southerners.

Check in with The Orchard Street Press in January for their 2023 contest.

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Looking for the Banded Sphinx

++++++ I’d seen clutched last night to the railing
its wings of veined mahogany like a master craftsman’s
the way my brother’s finest tables
were inlaid in gold and amber

++++++ yet, only the marsh hawk waits
atop the same wooden rail outside the same glass door
its wing-shoulders brownish-gray
as any familiar relative

++++++ and even its flight, when it senses
the small breeze of my arrival, appears
blasé as a loping dog

++++++++++ Last night, the next-door young couples
played guitar as midnight lapsed into new year
sang Jolene in a lusty chorus
that rose and fell like the distant sea pulled
by a stranger’s violin

++++++ I ask my husband about the banded moth
Gone, he says, at first light
without a hint of nuance
++++++ the same way wonder disappears, the way
dust becomes fugitive

++++++++++ My eyes trace mid-morning’s
pale pentimento of moon
while at the edge of marsh a stalking ibis
is osmosed in plumes of fog
where sun glints cold creek
++++++ and we find no reason to speak
as the hawk melds like another riddle into winter’s
moss-draped bones

Susan Craig (Columbia, SC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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We Never Give Up Hoping

Morning frozen hard. Pour
++++boiling water
into the birdbath;
++++ they will come
to drink when I have gone.

++++ God of holy ice, holy
++++++++ steam,
++++ give my children
++++++++ water
++++ that all my hoping
++++++++ can’t.

Sound of wings, splash
++++ diminishing;
find the world again
++++ iced over.
Fill the kettle. Holy water.

Bill Griffin (Elkin, NC)
from Quiet Diamonds 2022, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mill OH

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EARLY SNOW: ASTERACEAE

Stare across any random autumn afternoon and soon you’ll notice the jig and curtsey of little airborne tufts. Catch one and see if there isn’t a tiny hard seed hanging from that feathery wisp. The early snowflake you’re holding is a member of family Asteraceae.

Except for Cardinal flower (Bellflower family, Campanulaceae) and Meadowbeauties (Meadow Beauty family, Melastomataceae), all the flowers mentioned in my homage above are members of the Composite family (Asteraceae). This is the largest family of flowering plants in North America and vies for the world title with Orchidaceae. Besides typical species like asters, sunflowers, black-eyed susans, and coneflowers, Asteraceae includes less obvious suspects like Joe-Pye Weed, goldenrod, ragweed.

Study a daisy: you figure you’re seeing one standard flower, right? A ring of petals around the edge (corolla), eye in the center. Basic taxonomy of flowers depends on the configuration of their reproductive apparatus – flowers. But a daisy is a Composite – each “petal” is 3 or more fused petals from a complete individual Ray flower; each spot in the eye is an individual Disc flower with its own minuscule petals, pistil, and stamen, ready to make a seed. (And if that’s not already confusing, some Composites have only Ray flowers, no Disc (Dandelion), and some have only Disc flowers with no Rays (Fireweed).)

So what about this early snow, then? Ah, sepal and pappus . . .

In most flowers, sepals are the layer, just outside the petals, that make up the protective bud cloak. After the bud opens, the ring of sepals is called the calyx. In Composites, each “flower” actually multiple little florets all clumped together with zero elbow room, the calyx is diminished to almost nothing: the pappus, sometimes visible only with a microscope where it’s fixed to the seed. Except . . . those members of Asteraceae whose pappus is a bristle, hair, tendril, feather. For wind dispersal, but also for wonder and delight. When a breeze puffs the boneset or fireweed or lowly dandelion, one might imagine the pasture will soon be knee deep.

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Doughton Park Tree 2021-02-23

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