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Old is New is Old

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 4, 2022| 8 Comments »

[poems by Kathleen Wakefield]

A slew of 35 degree days and 20 degree nights make the rare and lovely snow hard as a skillet and slick as spilt grease (olive oil in my case). Our favorite trails want to maim us. I tried walking down the ridge back of our house and made it about twenty yards before I realized just one slip and I’d be sliding on my butt all the way into Dutchman Creek. When I turned back uphill I couldn’t take a step. My trekking poles wouldn’t pierce the crust.

Yesterday I ventured back to Grassy Creek and the MST for the first time in two weeks. Shaded areas were crunchy and slippy but sunkissed slopes had cleared. As I hiked I was specifically looking for leaves poking through the snow to photograph: cranefly orchid, wild ginger, pipsissewa. And then I came upon eight little alien life forms such as I’d never seen.

Imagine a thumb-sized lemon cupcake with a beak of orange icing in the center. The cupcake papers peel back to make a grungy collar. Each little cakelet is elevated on a 3 inch tangled stalk like chewed up rutabaga or moldy hemp. One of the cupcakes is broken and oozing white custard. And they are all peering through the snowy crust as if they intend to take over this dormant and unsuspecting planet.

I figured weird looking = fungus. After much searching I learned their identities – Calostoma lutrescens. Yellow-stalked puffball (not actually in the same clade as true puffballs), “pretty mouth,” or “hot lips.” Listed as common in the Southern Appalachians. Shoot, thought I’d found something new and rare. On the other hand there was only this one little cluster of eight fruits in four miles of trail; their little cupcakes will no doubt dry, shrivel, and disappear within a few days; I’d certainly never seen anything like them before.

Common does not preclude rare. Old they are, but new to me.

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Why We Do Not Cut the Meadow Down

It establishes itself like the sea.
We ride its swells.
Two kinds of dragonfly, cobalt and crimson,
a pair of catbirds, orioles skim the tops of the grasses,
insect glints, multitudes unnamed.

Once it was an orchard, a woods,
before that a real sea that left us a lake.
Today the dry meadow is all fire and pulse –
hot sputter of crickets, bees cruising the nightshade,
the wings of a small white butterfly dipping at this and that,
yes and yes above the brasses where light assembles.

The meadow admits stray saplings, cottonwood and ash.
Opens to rain like a body full of desire.
The fringed flags of the grasses take note of
the least wind: when you think it’s still
a cloud of pollen swells and lifts.

The meadow does not mistake the seed –
scutcheoned, tasseled or winged – for anything else
Whatever comes into the meadow, earthworm, black beetle, ant,
feels the long fall of sunlight on its back
before it descends.

Kathleen Wakefield
+++ from Grip, Give and Sway, Silver Birch Press, © 2016

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Reverent. Grateful. Seeking. The poems in Kathleen Wakefield’s Grip, Give and Sway require attention from the reader but they hold nothing back. Their beauty bewitches but also unsettles, like dawn when the dark forest holds its breath and anticipates light. Gradually the shapes of trees arise. I found myself reading each poem twice, then again, to take in everything it wanted to impart.

Each of the book’s four sections has its own subtle voice: imagistic and deeply rooted, lyrical and lingering on the tongue, lightly touching the moment to make it universal. In the final section the invisible stenographer observes and records the millennia and their follies but sometimes forsakes her reserve and becomes a participant. This is a book that inspires both deep feeling and deep thought, that invites contemplation about what is within us and what is without us.

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The Invisible Stenographer Tries Not to Look in the Mirror

What would she see –
++++ ++++ ++++ transparency
of oxygen, or eyes smudged with kohl?

Head-binding wimple.
++++ ++++ ++++ Sky blue burkha.
Iron brank tearing into the tongue
which said too much.

A cat mask, candle-lit, trimmed
with gold sequins and feathers
++++ ++++ the color of a bishop’s robe.

Hematite lips, lips drawn in rose madder;
cheeks ash streaked; tattooed;
++++ white powdered, porcelain smooth

++++ A single pearl drop earring
dangling above a creamy ruff
++++ ++ of belgian lace
stained from centuries of use.

Is everything she sees
who she is?
++++ Why not a coiled forest of dreadlocks,
or the shapeliness of a head
shaved to the cool shine of the moon?

Or worry crossing a woman’s brow
++++ like cloud shadow troubling a wheatfield,
as if she were remembering a stove
on at thome, the child left
too long alone.

Kathleen Wakefield
+++ from Grip, Give and Sway, Silver Birch Press, © 2016

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Rumors

All night the bee that’s clung
++++ to the sunflower, dark as
++++ ++++ coffee, waits for the sun

to warm its stilled apparatus,
++++ one leg ticking like the hand of a tiny clock
++++ ++++ that can’t get started.

See how the morning glories,
++++ like closed umbrellas glazed
++++ ++++ with rain, open in the cool air

to cobalt cups of heaven
++++ or the idea of heaven, gone
++++ ++++ by noon. The wood thrush

I’ve never seen repeats
++++ last night’s song, trill and lick
++++ ++++ spilling from the flute of its throat

as if it knows a rigorous joy,
++++ as if the world’s consolable.
++++ ++++ Blue sky, clear and widened

like a mind that’s looked into itself and beyond,
++++ is this what we fear, or long for?
++++ ++++ Caught

in the undertow of the linden’s shade,
++++ rumors of something sweet and light
++++ ++++ and never forgotten.

Kathleen Wakefield
+++ from Grip, Give and Sway, Silver Birch Press, © 2016

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I learned about Kathleen Wakefield and her poetry through her friend Patricia Hooper, also featured in these pages. She has worked as a poet-in-the-schools and taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester.

Give, Grip and Sway and Silver Birch Press.

More about the Calostoma genus, which includes the irresistibly named and undeniably repugnant “tomato-in-aspic” fungus.

 

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IMG_0768

 

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New is Old is New

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2022| 4 Comments »

[with poems by Augusta Wray]

1932, Charlotte, North Carolina – the Great Depression has all but silenced the constant rumble of railcars from Atlanta to D.C. through this hub of the South. Most of the cotton mills are shuttered but Ben Gossett, president of Chadwick-Hoskins, has an idea. He asks President Herbert Hoover for help. Mill workers will weave cloth from 50,000 bales of cotton sitting in idled factories and sew it into clothing for the needy. Slowly the Queen City will again stir to life.

That same year, 1932, The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra was founded. More songs were recorded in Charlotte than in Nashville (and just 4 years later Bill Monroe would make his first recording in a closed Charlotte warehouse). Seeking a different kind of music, six poets gathered that spring in the home of Edna Wilcox Talley to begin a venture dedicated to expanding the appreciation of poetry in their state. The North Carolina Poetry Society would begin to admit members whose skills “measured up.” Over the next few years they would hold monthly workshops and an annual banquet, with a prominent writer as speaker, begin publication of a regional literary journal, and slowly expand their reach from Charlotte to the entirety of the state and beyond.

One of these Charter Members was August Wray. She had lived in Charlotte since her marriage in 1902. She attended every meeting of the NCPS through the 1950’s. Her poems would appear in The North Carolina Poetry Review, Journal of American Poetry, and many other publications, especially the poetry column of The Charlotte Observer, edited by Andrew Hewitt. She won many poetry honors and prizes in the 1930’s and 1940’s. And in 1959 she would publish a full length collection, Engravings on Sand, edited by Dorothy Edwards Summerrow.

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Trees at Night

Ink spots upon a midnight sky – fantastic,
+++ sinister and dark –
At night, trees take on fearsome shapes
+++ with no detail of leaf or bark
To add to grace of swaying limb where
+++ branches curve and intertwine,
No carven foliage of jade – all monotone
+++ in black design,

Carbon pictures, weird and ghostly, of night
+++ Dragons crouched to spring,
Warily silent and foreboding, menacing,
+++ like a wounded thing –
Smoky masses, deeply shadowed, with outlines blurred
+++ that mystify –
Trees clutch the heart in night’s dark silence
+++ silhouetted against the sky.

Augusta Wray
+++ from Engravings on Sand, Poets Press, Charlotte NC, © 1959

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Last week I received Engravings on Sand in the mail. Bibliophile Carmela Dodd discovered it at a flea market and upon reading its inscription by Augusta Wray to “Mrs. Charles Evans,” Carmela felt that the book deserved a home with the North Carolina Poetry Society. Thank you, Carmela! What an amazing artifact and memorial during the Society’s 90th anniversary year.

Dorothy Edwards Summerrow, who edited the collection, writes this to begin her foreward: When, at Augusta Wray’s request, I was given the pleasure of compiling and editing “Engravings on Sand,” there was turned over to me a large suitcase literally bulging with poetry manuscript. Dorothy describes excitement but also dismay at selecting the best work of one of North Carolina’s finest poets . . . because I must of necessity select for public inspection, only a small fraction of the prodigious output of her private heart.

In 1959 Augusta Wray was 83 years old. She had been widowed four years earlier. She and her husband had no children nor other close family; she told Dorothy, “My poems are my children.” Dorothy describes the treasure before her: When I opened the suitcase entrusted to me, the sparkle of the poems made the dark, rainy afternoon brilliant with the fire of many gems.

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Release

In the dark and tranquil stillness of the night
When quietude has simulated peace,
When joy is born without the aid of light
And sorrows softly fade away and cease,
When weary eyes are drifting into sleep
That carries them afar from day’s dull care,
When dreams appear invitingly to seep
Through all perplexities and leave them bare –
Then does the spirit take command and things
Become unreal and float away like foam;
The soul is loosed and on unweary wings
takes leave of what was once its mortal home.
++ The soul and body separate, go free,
++ When sleep, or death, gives them their liberty.

Augusta Wray
+++ from Engravings on Sand

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Nocturne in Silver

Silver shadows in somber silence
Wrap folds around the tranquil night,
Silver rain from a silver moon
Pours its radiance through silver light.

Sleeping leaves from moon-drenched branches
Drip silver pendants edged with pearl,
Flowers with their petals closing
Gleam with silver as the furl.

Cobwebs, silver-strewn with dewdrops,
Chiming tone when brushed by moth wings,
Are silken harps, tht quivering, make
Plaintive music from silver strings.

Augusta Wray
+++ from Engravings on Sand

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The seasons . . . love . . . death . . . these are the themes of most of Augusta Wray’s collected poems. She is steeped in Carolina culture and climes. In this final poem I’ve chosen, though, I hear an understated voice of longing and regret. Perhaps she refers here to her childlessness, but perhaps she is opening herself, and her readers, to discovering beauty in the reality that is her life – who cares what it may have seemed to some to lack?

Flowering Plum

In loveliness she stands,
Blonde beauty rare,
With white and fragile hands
Folded in prayer.

Of bridal purity,
A perfumed veil
Hides with security
A body frail.

The season waits for her,
She blooms each year
When winds softly murmur:
“Spring is now here.”

Feathered choristers sing
Blithely and loud,
Sheltered beneath the wing
Of petaled cloud..

Lonely she stand apart,
No fruit she bears.
Such beauty serves the heart.
Barren? . . . Who cares?

Augusta Wray
+++ from Engravings on Sand

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Dorothy Edwards Summerrow was a renowned Carolina poet herself, winner in 1957 of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. She also noted in the foreward: In Silver Echoes, the poetry anthology published in the spring of 1959 by the North Carolina Federation and edited and compiled by this editor, more of [Augusta Wray’s] poetry is included that that of any other writer in the state.

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History of the North Carolina Poetry Society

Charlotte / Mecklenburg historical timeline

Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry

2015-06-15Doughton Park Tree

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Cycles ~ Circle’s Close

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 21, 2022| 17 Comments »

[with 3, no, 4 poems by Paul Jones]

Oh well . . . life goes on . . .

No it doesn’t! Who ever said that? At least not on and on and on. And the problem is not growing old, the problem is everyone around me is growing older.

I’m biased and I know it – too many all-nighters in the ICU knowing my patients will never wake up, will never breathe again without that machine. Why choose to prolong those hours? Too many weekly visits to the nursing home, my patients who will never again chew, swallow, recognize, understand, smile. Why choose to prolong those days?

Still, when you are breathing and smiling there’s a huge hurdle to leap before you’re willing to talk about how you want your body treated when you can’t breathe or smile. Easy to put off making that living will when you’re in the midst of living; too late when you’re in the midst of dying.

Last year I spent a few weeks helping Dad update his and Mom’s will and estate. Gather up mounds of papers, talk things over, scratch heads, and then the final step: spending a morning with their attorney to nail it all down tight. Just because most politicians are attorneys does not imply the converse, that most attorneys are self-infatuated power-lusting villains. Not at all. Dad’s attorney, Ms. S., treated us like family. Like she was the cousin who knows a whole lot more than we do but who can explain it in a way anyone can understand.

To describe two hours with an attorney as a pleasure? Well, yes indeed.

As a family doctor I never found it easy to talk to my patients and their families about death. Necessary, yes; essential, yes; never easy. Perhaps it’s the taboo that if you name something you give it power over you. But a last will and testament is all about death. If you’re not going to die, don’t bother making a will.

Ms. S. talked with us for two hours about death, straight up, matter of fact. I learned a lot about what Dad and Mom want for their own final days and for a legacy to their children. I learned that Dad, in the right place and time, is willing and even anxious to talk about his death. We left the office smiling, arm in arm (figuratively as well as occasionally literally, 95-year old knees and all).

Of course, Dad still vows he’s going to live to a hundred. At least he’s got one helluva estate plan.

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Seventy Three

When in time frost found me, leaves were gone yellow
or fallen or few on branches or fallow
fields. Limbs were empty choir lofts. Youth’s bright birds sang
then left before the cold November must bring.
I found myself in twilight, the glow on snow
or rime on those brown stems or white wisps of breath
– how many more before death plants me below? –
But here I can see further, here my life’s breadth
forms a vista. Here where flames once leapt, grey ash
is heaped, warm still from what past fires I’ve known.
Still all this going is not completely gone.
Something of those late bird songs will stay, will last.
What we see in age makes all we love more strong,
knowing what we love we leave before too long.

Paul Jones
from Something Wonderful, Redhawk Publications, © 2021

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I’ve always been a bit in awe of Paul Jones’s poetic gifts. Envious even. Not only because he can make rhyme so damn modern but even more for his capacious breadth and depth. What an imaginative reach! I’m not reprinting To a Tuber here but read it and you will become convinced that the potato is within all the vegetable kingdom most elegant, elevated, and worthy of praise.

So I knew before I ordered my copy of Paul’s new book Something Wonderful that it would be, and it is. The sly wit is there, waiting to pounce, but also heartfelt longing and wry uncompromising looks into personal finitude. You don’t really discover why the cover is covered with 19th century illustrations of bats until page 80 and the title poem. Take the time, make the trip. It’s worth it.

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Ireland Seen from a Porch Swing in Hickory, NC
+++ — for Adrian Rice

Ireland is a country without porches.
What they call a porch is just an entry.
No one sits there watching for neighbors
walking by with their electric torches.
Their voices, soft as blossoms, gently
fill humid summer nights with rumors.

Over there, secrets are shared in the pubs.
From unsteady high stools, the stories, tinged
with irony, rise easily as smoke.
New worlds are created by old words spoken.
even the weightiest tales take on wings,
if only whispered above the hubbub.

But here, the slow news is told by moonlight
in the lazy tease of an August night.
Too often tea, iced and sweet, is the drink
that greets the blink of stars through the dark
as our voices wander, each twang distinct,
in the dog-starred nights and the torpid days.

It’s ghosts that bind us across our weathers,
that tie the lilt and slur of daily sagas
told inside and out, in bars and open air,
to some episodic common drama.
They appear here and there, vivid and stark,
in talk that reweaves their spells in the dark.

Paul Jones
from Something Wonderful, Redhawk Publications, © 2021

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Still Waters

I am still, waiting
for the one moment
that old Eastern sages
say gives absurdity
an absolute clarity,
the moment multiple
bald monks chant to induce.
They say the Way is
like water. It will work
its wonders at due time,
the way water always
breaks up rocks, turns them
into sand, but will not
be transformed itself.
Being water, it’s
already what it needs to be.
Winter and ice
merely redefine water.
Wind, when it works, only works
on the surface of water.
When fire meets water,
water is sent to heaven
but fire just becomes ash.
Water like saints returns
to perform its steady work.
Sleet, snow, rain or hail –
even fog – are water’s
temporary bodies.
In time, water will be
all part of one huge sea.
Water will save us all
in time. In time, they say.
In the meantime, be water
as best you can be. Me?
I am still waiting
for all waters to become
still, to run deep, and
clear a few things up.

Paul Jones
from Something Wonderful, Redhawk Publications, © 2021

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Saint of the Trees

What is the proper sacrifice
To please our Lord, the Saint of Trees?
I asked the ferns for their advice:
What is the proper sacrifice?

“Lie here and dream of paradise,
Sink into the soil like the leaves.
That is the proper sacrifice
To please our Lord, the Saint of Trees.”

Paul Jones
from Something Wonderful, Redhawk Publications, © 2021

 

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2014-07-13 Doughton Park Tree

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