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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.

❦ ❦ ❦

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).

❦ ❦ ❦

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

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Liminal

Posted in family, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Clara Jean Griffin, Cookie Griffin, family, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on September 5, 2025| 9 Comments »

[for my mother]

Liminal

crepuscular

You take my hand and lead

me from the porch, leavings

of sticky watermelon rind,

half-eaten hotdogs, out into

the yard where the older kids

whoop in the descent

of darkness almost too deep

to see through; at its edge

grownups in folding chairs,

the orange winks of their cigarettes

like lightning bugs.

Too dark. You feel me hanging back

but here around the corner

real fireflies guide us, cool green,

silent. You catch one

in your hands, Like this . . .

when I was a girl, laughing

in the twilight; you pinch off

its tiny ember and smear

the glowing on your eyelids

so that when you close your eyes

its faint gaze assures

that you still see me.

And the truly wondrous thing,

besides this moment together while

the luminescence fades

and I am able too to laugh,

is that once you were a girl.

❦❦❦

All stories are true. The story’s facts may get a bit smudged & skewed, a bit shuffled & stretched, a bit jiggled & juxtaposed & conflated, but the story’s truth is undiminished. Good stories know their truth. The best stories know your truth. You discover it in their pages. Perhaps it was always in you, smudged & skewed – now you are following its trail into the open.

A poem has its own particular way of telling its story. Planed down until you can see the grain. That burl is a metaphor for the winter storm when something cracked. The curly maple echoes laughter you can still hear tinkling faint from the past. Storms and laughing are metaphors for what you’re facing this morning when you roll out of bed. The poem rolls you out of bed. It won’t feed you lying down.

And in a poem the story lives on its own fine edge. It balances the limn between nothing and everything. Wait here, breathing slowly, at the transition between dusk and night. Or between darkness and dawn. The poem’s story may seem at ease but in the silence beside the swift river you can hear the rush, the flow, the movement. The poem taps the shoulder of awareness – look ahead, look back, live right now in all those moments that coalesce to make a life. Your story is unfolding, and don’t you know it’s true?

❦❦❦

Liminal

riparian

Let’s tube the Brandywine: you

are brilliant, my kids so fractious,

lucky to keep them for an hour

in the same room with Grandmommy

much less engaged.

All the lazy afternoon

watched over by staid sycamores

of summer, the splashing,

the dunking, and through smooth

passages you get them talking

about yesterday’s museum, Howard Pyle

and the Wyeths, art, its stories,

how if we can only imagine

something strongly enough

we may make it so.

Imagine: all things flow,

the benevolent stream, its clarity

every possibility of color

and everything it collects,

benediction of damp

on our bodies, water and salt,

half-adrift in the dailyness

of life and where

might this meandering take us?

At the takeout toweling off

you touch my shoulder, point:

a tree swallow’s looping masterwork

has knit together river, forest, sky,

metallic blue . . . brilliant.

❦❦❦

A story about Mom: when I was five we lived in a little house on Marion Road in Memphis. Mom had made a special cake for my birthday surprise, German chocolate with thick gooey coconut and pecan frosting. She hid it in the little closet pantry until after supper, but when she brought it out for five candles, she wept. It was covered with ants. Don’t you think my brother and I were able to pick off the little crawlies and eat it anyway? And every year at birthday time we piped up, “Mom, make us another Ant Cake!” It was years before she could laugh.

Another one: Mom and Dad moved away from the South before I was born, but her friends in Michigan or Ohio or Delaware could still detect the remnants of her North Carolina accent. I believe they always thought her a bit prim. When I was fifty I happened to visit Mom in Wilmington DE around Halloween. She said, “Let’s go trick-or-treating!” I figured we’d just walk down the block and say Hi to the neighbors, but she came out of the bedroom wearing a cape and hunchback, an old wig pulled all the way down over her face, and stark staring eyes painted on her cheeks. A wooly booger. None of the neighbors knew who the hell she was and they flinched visibly when she cackled.

Last story?: Mom was the czarina of crosswords, and she could finish the entire Jumble in the morning paper while I was still juggling the first word. The last few months of her life, at ninety-six, she would sit on the couch after breakfast and I would bring in the paper, sit down beside her, and hand her a pen. Sometimes, I admit, I had to offer her hints (assuming I myself could figure out the words). But at times she would put pen to paper, hesitate just a moment, and fill in the blocks with faint, spidery letters. Just right, Mom. Just right.

❦❦❦

Liminal

nonagenarian

Every Sunday after church I knock

at your kitchen door then forge on through

to the living room before you can struggle

from your favorite chair, milky tea

half-finished, The Times crossword

and a few spaces you’ve saved me,

78 down, wings, four letters, and today

I’ve brought my grand-daughter,

your great-. We’ve taken to calling her

Sister like your brother and all

the cousins called you,

and while she cuddles your old doll

almost ninety itself and explains

to it the universe of her three years

you settle your pad across your lap,

charcoal on your fingers, capture

the purity of her which is the closest

we will ever come to defining love,

the three of us a grand alignment

of planets in some untrammeled

system, and although the scratch scratch

on paper binds me to this moment

I see you luminescent, intangible,

the halo of fine white hair that limns

your face, your wings, alae,

strong enough to lift us all.

Bill Griffin

first appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal – Issue 32, Summer 2018

Online at https://grey-sparrow-press.com/32-liminal-bill-griffin/

❦❦❦

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Same and Different

Posted in Christian themes, Imagery, tagged imagery, Ludwigia, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, Philip Levine, poetry on August 29, 2025| 2 Comments »

[ with Breath by Phillip Levine]

❦

God within

God around

in all creation

God is found

We joined our voices to sing this tiny hymn by Randall Pratt to conclude this morning’s worship. Sing it once and the song is no more than a breath or two. Sing it through a second time, repeat, again. The simple refrain begins to open the singers, unexpected possibilities emerge, and an idea arises in these hearts gathered here – perhaps God desires to be found. Mystery of mysteries, revealed in simplicity. Together we repeat this tiny hymn ten times and it swells to become huge within us.

❦

God is stillness.

God is moving, moving, ever moving.

God is one beautiful truth discovered.

God is anxiety that so much yet remains unknown.

God cleaves together.

God cleaves apart.

God is always the same.

God is always changing.

There is nothing that is not God.

There is nowhere that is not God.

❦

Yesterday I walked a short trail not much frequented. In a few weeks I will guide a naturalist hike along this section and yesterday I wanted to make sure I knew everything. “Same and Different,” I’m thinking to title the gathering. So many autumn flowers are the same yellow; so many different forms and lives. And although I expected I would already be familiar with everything I would see as I walked yesterday, the universe, like God of course, is always new. No coincidence there. After squishing through a damp patch, knocked out by the riot of cardinal flower and the seethe and potential of unfurling ironweed, I was suddenly halted by something different.

Yellow. Its four petals arranged at right angles were soft, curled, but when I smoothed them I found little banners on short pedicels, like the cardboard fans we hand out in Southern churches on summer Sundays. At the center of each was a powder puff cluster of pistil/stamens. One notices such details when leaning in close to make friends, but even from down the trail some meters removed this odd little plant still whispered its distinctiveness. Different and the same. Surely I’ve seen you before! How many minutes shall I pause and contemplate?

Then of course being me I looked it up. The joy is in the encounter but also in discovering all the connections. Seedbox or Rattlebox this delicate bloom is called by human beings, with an almost comical genus name, Ludwigia. But this is how I know you now – humble cousin of primrose prepared to stand up to the flash of iron and authority of cardinals.

❦

Return to this Sunday morning. We’ve closed the service with song and hugged goodbye. As the others drive away from church, I walk down to the little pond at the back of the property. I’ve seen some yellow flowers there. Even before I reach them, clustering at water’s edge, I know they are the same and different. More like a shrub than a nature trail herb, leaves narrow little arrows, but here are four soft petals that want to curl under, here is the powder puff center. Ludwigia, every day you rise up to greet me and remind me there will always be more to discover. You certainly favor damp and muck. You certainly have yellow down pat. But before I delve into your taxonomy and dig up answers I’ve yet to even question, let me simply stand here a moment and appreciate. Stillness ever moving. The unchangeable that is always new. A certain melody that is still playing in my head belongs to you, too, little flower. Within, around, in all creation . . . found.

❦

Ludwigia alternifolia — Seedbox

Ludwigia decurrens — Wingleaf Primrose-Willow

Ludwigia alternifolia

Ludwigia decurrens

❦ ❦ ❦

Breath

Who hears the humming

of rocks at great height,

the long steady drone

of granite holding together,

the strumming of obsidian

to itself? I go among

the stones stooping

and pecking like a

sparrow, imagining

the glacier’s final push

resounding still. In

a freezing mountain

stream, my hand opens

scratched and raw and

flutters strangely,

more like an animal

or wild blossom in wind

than any part of me. Great

fields of stone

stretching away under

a slate sky, their single

flower the flower

of my right hand.

Last night

the fire died into itself

black stick by stick

and the dark came out

of my eyes flooding

everything. I

slept alone and dreamed

of you in an old house

back home among

your country people,

among the dead, not

any living one besides

yourself. I woke

scared by the gasping

of a wild one, scared

by my own breath, and

slowly calmed

remembering your weight

beside me all these

years, and here and

there an eye of stone

gleamed with the warm light

of an absent star.

Today

in this high clear room

of the world, I squat

to the life of rocks

jewelled in the stream

or whispering

like shards. What fears

are still held locked

in the veins till the last

fire, and who will calm

us then under a gold sky

that will be all of earth?

Two miles below on the burning

summer plains, you go

about your life one

more day. I give you

almond blossoms

for your hair, your hair

that will be white, I give

the world my worn-out breath

on an old tune, I give

it all I have

and take it back again.

Philip Levine

online at The Academy of American Poets

❦

Please explore my new page – FLORA – which meanders from spring into summer on the Elkin & Allegheny Nature Trail (a segment of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail).