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[with 3 poems by Rick Campbell]
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The Light We Call Winter
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If you see me walking down
the shell road under myrtle
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and Spanish moss, don’t worry.
The road’s a circle and it brings me
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back to my yellow mailbox.
You might give me the name
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of the bird that sat all morning
on the thin branch.
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Give me the last lost months gone
in a haze, sloughed off like an old dog
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shakes himself dry.
Walk with me.
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I won’t say
I don’t need you.
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Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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When the first Human woke up on their first morning on Mother Earth, they discovered all the other persons watching them. The Plant persons, the Animal persons, the Lichen and Fungus persons, all of them had already been living together on Mother Earth for a very long time and they knew how to get along. Now here was this new member of the family, this Human. No doubt everyone was asking themselves whether this new person would also learn how to get along.
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The Human opened their eyes and the first thing they said was, “How did I get here?” A question Humans would spend a very, very long time trying to answer. Then the Human stood up, looked all around, and asked, “What am I doing here?!”
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At this point the Creator of Mother Earth and Every Living Thing smiled. Yep, those are the right questions. Two of the big ones. And don’t forget the third, maybe even bigger and maybe even more important. The Human noticed all the persons watching – Plant, Animal, Fungus, all of them – and asked, “Who are you?” The Creator smiled even wider. Yep!
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❦
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A nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass for inspiring this little parable. And a nod to Rick Campbell for poking at all the questions until they wake up and try to swim to the surface. The answers you’re going to get in this life depend on the questions you ask.
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Be sure to ask, really, the questions no one knows the answers to. I almost wrote “the questions no one knows how to ask,” but how is something you certainly do know. The more you pay attention, the more you wonder, the more you know how to ask those questions. Not ask like Rodin’s Thinker with your chin on your fist in placid contemplation. More like lying awake at 4 a.m. in a sweat and doubting but asking anyway whether there’s any reasonable hope for you, you Human.
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What am I doing here? I haven’t needed an answer as long as I’ve been always doing, doing. In fact I don’t even know there’s a question until I stop. (Maybe Rodin’s silent seated ponderer is an apt image after all.) In that momentary pause, in that engulfing silence, the questions suddenly loom huge and overwhelming. Why am I? What is my purpose? And cold, dark nothing threatens to bring its answer.
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But then I look around. Who are all these others? All these persons, Human and not, sharing this circle with me? Can we get along? May I know them? It’s never too late to ask. Never too late to try.
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Practicing Silence
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Outside of NYC, it’s
almost impossible
to be mistaken
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for a mime. Here,
at the edge of the country
I’m just a guy who moves
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silently down crushed shell
roads, through pine forests
in deep sand, past the harbor’s
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broken docks. Ok, yes,
I could talk more, but to whom,
the clerk at the Dollar General?
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What would I find worth saying
more than thanks? Buzzards whirl
over my head like synchronized swimmers.
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Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Frank X. Gaspar writes this in the introduction to Fish Streets Before Dawn: In the poem Throwing Starfish Back into the Sea [Rick] wonders how much “good he has done” with his uncertain act of kindness. It is an apt poem, and taken in the context of this collection and its outcries, we see that Rick Campbell’s wanderings and questing are testimony to the core of his art: surviving, yes, but surviving as the step that allows us to pursue any small good we can bring along with us.
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Rick Campbell lives in Alligator Point, Florida, and teaches in the University of Nevada-Reno’s MFA program. He has published seven earlier poetry collections, plus a collection of essays,
Sometimes the Light. His most recent poetry collection,
Fish Street Before Dawn, from Press 53 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is available
HERE .
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Xenoglossy
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I once wrote of my mill town
that you can want all your life here.
I was in love with words and
the directions they might lead:
into the temple of furnace fire
and out again? Along
a ridge with hawks drafting
thermals? Blues as it’s bent
at the crossroads? Freight trains
clacking downriver under the cloaked moon?
Just empty space?
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At night I speak in the tongues
of angels and fools: babble
imperfect definitions of desiderate, lack,
+++++++++++++++++++ ought.
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Yesterday, blades of grass parted
as the pygmy rattler sidled away
from my boot. I wanted to call
the hawk in the pine tree
down to snatch it up, but
I had no tongue for hawk.
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What did I know? I am older.
It wasn’t just home that wanted,
not just the valley that lacked.
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Rick Campbell
from Fish Streets Before Dawn, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Thanks Les. Witness to the pain and the joy. ---B