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Earth Day Prelude – Three

Posted in ecology, Ecopoetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2024| 5 Comments »

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April 19, 2024
 . 
…the path to heaven 
doesn’t lie down in flat miles. 
It’s in the imagination 
with which you perceive 
this world 
and the gestures 
with which you honor it.
++++++ Mary Oliver
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Insects with Long Childhoods
 . 
June bug, stag beetle, cicada –
three, seven, thirteen years as larvae
 . 
feasting underground in the gentle
rot of roots and castoffs, gone generations,
 . 
only a few weeks in the light
sharp as the blades of consciousness, incessant
 . 
buzz, cosmic background of loss
threaded through late summer’s throbbing
 . 
days, lush nights, a brevity so full
it must feel like th eternity they came from.
 . 
I have a child who asks a question
of the air’s every hum. He has not learned grief.
 . 
Sky, he says, and shovels soil into his mouth,
let’s it drip out mud.
 . 
Hannah Fries
from ECOTHEO Review, 3/2024
 . 
Shared by Lynda Rush Myers, Durham NC, who writes:
 . 
The poet, Hannah Fries, reminds me of Pattiann Rogers: scientific, technical, yet capturing the dense brevity of her subjects’ lives. The turn of the poem came as a touching surprise.  Every parent can relate.  A child’s word and actions capture his reality. The mother enjoys the unforgettable moment, knowing her son will learn grief all too soon.
 .
++++++ Lynda
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There is only one subject:  what it feels like to be alive.  Nothing is irrelevant.  Nothing is typical.
++++++ Richard Rodriquez, in American Scholar, Spring 2002
 . 
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. 
++++++ Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Fly
 . 
Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
 . 
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
 . 
For I dance,
And drink, & sing
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
 . 
If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,
 . 
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.
 . 
William Blake (1757 – 1827)
from Songs of Experience; in the public domain.
 . 
Shared by Paul Karnowski, Asheville NC, who writes:
 . 
I like the connection Blake makes between the narrator and the “trivial” fly.  Humans too easily dismiss the rest of the natural world because we have the ability to “think.”  But it’s the countless thoughtless acts of blind hands – from other humans – that bring about our demise. Life and death connects us all – from the greatest thinker to the lowliest fly. 
 . 
++++++ Paul
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Am I leading the life that my soul, / Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question / That seems at least as meaningful as the question / Am I leading the life I want to live.
++++++ Carl Dennis, A Chance for the Soul from Practical Gods
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❦ ❦ ❦
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If I Fell
 . 
Crow knows me.
Can see the difference
between me and another.
 . 
Gave me a feather
I keep
in case I need to fly.
 . 
I know Crow
from Blackbird
and Raven
yet wonder
what Crow
would want
to keep
from me.
 . 
Perhaps a token
of my essence
 . 
in case Crow needs
to dream of flying.
 . 
David Dixon
Poetry In Plain Sight 2024, NC Poetry Society
 . 
Shared by Jenny Bates, Germanton, NC, who writes:
 . 
Life is a process of waking up from a long and ancient sleep of the soul. David Dixon embodies this whether he means to or not in his poetry. This poem I chose to send, If I Fell, has also been chosen for 2024 Poetry in Plain Sight through the NC Poetry Society.
As far as my own poem, it is a plea, a prayer that each of us has to fill up the emptiness inside us in different ways…even the Earth. My poem, Conceived and Born is from my Pushcart nominated book, ESSENTIAL.
 . 
++++++ Jenny
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❦
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Conceived and Born
 .
There’s no suckling here
 .
as though we were
 .
going to get some anyway
 .
The sanctity of Earth is a fast.
 .
The holy presence of prayer a fast.
 .
We are born of a mother that is not
dependent on us.
 .
She is a planet — and a small, fragile
one at that.
 .
Jenny Bates, Germanton NC
from Essential, Redhawk Publications © 2023
 .
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❦ ❦ ❦
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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.
++++++ William Shakespeare, As You Like It
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❦ ❦ ❦
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To celebrate EARTH DAY 2024 we are featuring seven posts of poems submitted by readers – poems by William Blake to Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers to A.R.Ammons to Linda Pastan, and by a number of contemporary poets. Check in every day or two – connect to the earth and to each other!
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Discover

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2024| 3 Comments »

IMG_9629, flower
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[with two prose poems by Mark Cox]
. .
Poem at Forty I Could Not Finish Until I Turned Sixty
. .
The seas below our house pitch deep and soundless. Like sweat engrained in handrails, or the oil darkened edges of our dining room table, every shadow implies more shadow.
. .
Late summer has quieted the cicadas, damped their dwindling number with the lastness of their deaths. There is a chill to the air, no wind at all. My youngest son is twenty days old, feeble, burrowing in and out of awareness, still unsure his body isn’t trying to kill him. He cries to eat, he cries to sleep, he cries as his tiny gut rejects what all must go to waste.
. .
Last week, scientists discovered the bones of a humanoid who fell into a well shaft three million years ago. His wife said he’d turn up! That the world has no pity for the individual life, this is no secret to anyone, yet we just can’t get over it. I am here in the middle of a bed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my life, my son nestled as if he were my own bones, as if we’ve both toppled forty years down into positions we’ll retain forever. There is no chiropractor for the soul.
. .
The museum of loss has at last opened its doors to me. Scholars cannot agree, the docents say, but almost certainly arms encircling the body was an omen of intimacy. Little is known of the fabled kiss; what remains of crude glyphs and mosaic shards indicate our elders once believed that souls were exchanged. One cannot, of course, touch anything in the museum of oss. One can only view what was once there. Nothing can be imagined and remain the same.
. .
Just what does this portend? There will always be a thermos next to the detonator, a pair of reading glasses weighting the sentence handed down without mercy. An airman in WWII, John Ciardi recounted how once from the blister all gunners sat in, he watched the bomber beside him burning. His counterpart waved up as that other plane went down.
. .
Each age has its designated bandwidth. Without warning, my son is twenty and in love. We are belted in. Splitting space. In his lap, he holds one hand with another, as if to keep its fingers from detaching, as if I’d helped him hurry to the car, and was driving to a hospital. I want my tree back the way it was, he whined, one autumn morning. He was four or so and knew even then what he’s now not able to share.
. .
Much is felt that resists being known. If there are seven billion human beings on earth, then every day is 19 million years of experience, just all at once. Somehow, I find this comforting, though by now you’d think we’d know what we are doing.
. .
Mark Cox
from Knowing, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Better to resist the flux and believe that something stays. At last, he thinks, that is his answer. How still it all is, so utterly clear. Then one bright leaf lets go and changes everything.
++++++Knowing, Mark Cox
. .
It all begins with a question. No, that comes second, first there’s noticing, and noticing that something is different. Wait, even before the noticing there has to be paying attention. No, no, it all begins with this: just being there, moving through the world, part of all the changes.
. .
Joe just texted Cynthia and me a remarkable photo taken along a path we’ve walked together more than a few times. Looks like Bloodroot – nothing else has those freaky leaves emerging from the earth like fingers of the undead – but the petals are different. Instead of a circle of daisy-like petals (radial symmetry) they are bunched and doubled. And the center is almost naked as a belly button.
. .
A hybrid, we ask ourselves? But there are no other species in genus Sanguinaria with which to hybridize. A mutant, then. Sure enough, we discover online images of Bloodroot Multiplex with these peony-like blossoms, all of them propagated from a spontaneous mutation first discovered in Ohio years ago. Sterile flowers in which the stamens have reverted to petals. Evolution amok. Now we have the same mutation here in our backyard.
. .
❦
. .
Plants that make flowers first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago. Their flowers left the seeds exposed – they were naked (gymnosperms = conifers and gingko). Gymnosperms ruled for over 200 million years until the first flowering plants evolved forms that keep their seeds enclosed. But the outcome of the mutations that eventually resulted in plants with such protected seeds, angiosperms, was so successful that they have filled the earth with their variety and diversity. Every plant you see with flowers blooming this spring is an angiosperm (and even a lot whose flowers you don’t see, like grass for goodness sake).
. .
The enclosing ovary which cradles the ovule which will become the seed – what an excellent evolutionary idea! It most likely developed from mutations in fertile leaves which caused progressive curling and enfolding. All the parts of the flower – sepal, petal, stamen – are specialized modified leaves. But whenever we discover a Bloodroot flower with more than eight petals, we can assume that some of the extra petals are stamens which have turned back the evolutionary clock to become petals again.
. .
Is there anything we can hold on to that stays, fixed and static? Is it even possible to imagine something that never changes? Do I even really know what I think I know?
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❦
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There is only one thing that each and every one of us knows. Mark Cox reminds us what it is in Knowing – it’s something no one likes to talk about, but something Mark’s poetry is able to face and say in a hundred ways until we readers become more than willing to join the conversation. We’ve known it all along, maybe at times we’ve even braced for the brief plunge toward otherness, but in these prose poems we have a guide and a friend who is just as afraid as we are but braver about sharing his fear.
. .
Does a prose poem occupy some evolutionary niche between verse and narrative? Forget its phenotype: brevity, blockiness, absent linebreaks. What’s down deeper in its DNA? It seems to carry all the genes of its poetry forebears – language and imagery, rhythm and music, even internal rhyme – but it is its own genus. Unlike a story, it has no beginning, middle, and end – it is all middle. Crisis and denouement might embrace each other in the same line. (And can we even call them lines when they are all one? Sort of like the question how many grooves there are  on a 33 ⅓ rpm LP.) In the poem, everything is happening, but how is it happening? Oh wait, as I read the poem everything is happening in me.
. .
And what happens in me over and over as I read these poems, as it dawns on me that the one thing we all know, each and every one of us, is that we will die, is this: I look up from the page and talk to myself. I query, I wonder, I argue, I confess. I pick up the threads of so many internal conversations left dangling because they were difficult, or scary, or just pushed out of the present by quotidian distractions. I’m not saying that by reading a book by Mark Cox titled Knowing I have gained or been granted my own cosmic knowing. But I have been reminded that I want to.
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❦ ❦ ❦
. .
Music Box
++ For Ralph Angel
. .
Everything’s just peachy, comes the world report: all clear. We are not pirouetting on the tip of time’s scalpel; we are not screwing deeper into the ground’s veneer. It is just the fleeting dance we do until the delicate box closes, having learned now to bow before hurting ourselves.
. .
Today is Thursday once again and the man next door is off to get his mail. He will wander back reading, as is his wont to do, his wizened leashed dachshund dog sniffing the leaves. The breeze passes over our shrubs and still they stand. A wary sparrow peers from them be we shouldn’t call it hiding.
. .
Yes, we have learned how to brace for the brief plunge toward otherness. We have learned to keep our eyes open to the dark, even if it doesn’t matter. We see most vividly what cannot be seen, and this is always the case.
. .
In the caves of our past, flames flickered on the rough walls. Fear grew there beyond reason and all sense of proportion. Our shadows have always been bigger than we are, the house lights shining up as they do, not down.
. .
It would make sense to be offered a tune now. Something simple and genuine, a tale of longing fulfilled. Something to do with a childhood nightlight, a mother’s cool palm. Whatever it is, it will have to be a memory wound long ago.
. .
Such a blessing might be broadcast from just about anywhere. We receive it on this bureau with no clue wherefrom it issues, which ancient satellite or lofty transmission tower. On and off like a warning beacon, the message beams. Once all is said, one has no choice but to choose. Call it grace, call it wonder, just, as they say, keep it calling.
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Mark Cox
from Knowing, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; © 2024
Music Box first appeared in The Connecticut River Review
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about and purchase Knowing at Press 53 HERE
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IMG_0768, tree

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And Blooming 

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on March 8, 2024| 3 Comments »

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[ with 4 poems by Lori Powell]
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Wings
 . 
Not one bird but two,
black bead eyes staring,
feet curled into question marks.
No one but two
as if they’d made the trip together,
flying deluded to batter the glass
they believed was air, trees, clouds –
a whole landscape of death.
 . 
“There is the trash can,” I say
rolling the bodies
onto the white paper sack.
But my son insists on burial
there, in the parking lot
we push the red clay over them,
under a scrawny tree, itself barely alive.
 . 
Are you disillusioned now
small birds, wiser
in red clay than thin air?
 . 
I have my own
pact with illusion
a daily flight into the glass
my own small birds
stunned, not yet dead,
battering the spot
that might yield.
 . 
I will not bury you small birds,
my one chance at wings.
 . 
Lori Powell
from Truth and Lies, Black Buzzard Press, © 2000
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❦ ❦ ❦
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February 24, first naturalist hike of the season. I begin by telling everyone to look close, real, real close – any flowers we find blooming are likely to be tiny. (Although before we embark on the trail we stand for a minute beneath the huge Acer rubrum near the recreation center, a jillion brilliant flowers over our heads.) The pussytoes and star chickweed won’t be visible for another week or two, but we do discover one Virginia heartleaf with little purple buds just opening their mouths. And then there’s hepatica and trout lily.
 . 
Depending on which woods you walk in, one of these two is likely to be the first native flower to bloom. How do they know when it’s time? Those trees towering over them, bathed in lengthening daylight, can use the calendar to decide when to leaf out (although North American trees are surprisingly sensitive to soil temperature as well). What triggers the tiny plants of the understory to flower?
 . 
It’s a critical question because of one critical concept: spring light window. Wildflowers of temperate forests need to do most or even all of their growing before tree leafbuds burst and the canopy closes. We can see this on our walk today in the local orchid species – they make new leaves in late fall, dark green to absorb weak winter sunlight beneath bare trees, and by the time they bloom in summer their leaves will be gone. Hepatica keeps its old purpled leaves all winter, perhaps for the same reason, and will make new green after flowers fade. But fresh trout lily leaves appear only days before the yellow blossoms spring up.
 . 
Here are my observations: a little clump of hepatica may bloom here and there beginning in December if we have a string of warm days. Trout lily,though, is synchronized – see one leaf and you know within days you will see it everywhere, all blooming at once. Hepatica must be more sensitive to soil temperature and trout lily less so, needing a full spring warming to trigger. Or could trout lily even somehow sense daylight beneath those layers of brown leaves?
 . 
Phenology is the term for this study of cyclical biological phenomena: flowering, leaves, migration, nesting, insect hatching . . . . As the climate changes, “phenological mismatch” is dire – flowers may open when no pollinators are available. And if spring warming causes trees to leaf out earlier but trout lily can’t adapt, that critical spring light window may dim too soon for the little mottled fish-scale leaves to store enough root energy for next spring.
 . 
❦
See this article in NATURE for a deeper discussion of forest and wildflower phenology; comparison of North America, Europe, and Asia; and exploration of terms like FFD (first flower date), LOD (leaf out date), Spring Light Window, and Phenological Escape.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Without Teeth
 . 
Instead of striding fearless out of the sea
you’ve become the soft creature inside the shell.
The thing you wish you’d said
shouts in your ear all night long
then lies down
with the thing you wish you hadn’t done
and begets children.
Still you believe in hours without teeth,
hours when you can say,
“That’s not my blood seeping into the sand.”
Hope is ground from your bones.
Hope is the shell that winds you
tighter inside its coils.
 . 
 . 
The Origin of Snow
 . 
When I see a black dog in the snow
I stop wondering if you love me.
All the world’s wet places
have brimmed into flower at once,
as if difficult things
could happen this simply
dog in snow, black on white,
and my thoughts come home
like children with wet feet,
leaving puddles everywhere.
 . 
Lori Powell
from Truth and Lies, Black Buzzard Press, © 2000
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
How tall is that stack of unread books beside your bed, on the corner of your desk? Has your homeowner’s insurance raised your premium because of the chance of it tipping over onto your head? Has your home’s foundation shifted from the weight? At great personal risk, I’ve snaked a book from a lower stratum in one of my piles before its carbon could be crystallized to diamond. And discovered it’s layered with gems.
 . 
Lori Powell lives on the coast of Maine, where she teaches English to immigrants and refugees.  Her first poetry collection, Truth and Lies (Black Buzzard Press, Visions International) confirms Jean Cocteau: “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” These poems are condensed, crystallized, sharp enough to cut. The poet’s images, at first elusive, gradually blossom and bloom the longer I contemplate. And then, mirabile dictu, the truth on the page no longer belongs to the writer but belongs to me. A window opens and light enters.
 . 
❦
 . 
Truth and Lies is Volume 14 of the Black Buzzard Press Illustrated Chapbook Series, illustrations by Cathie France Nelson. Visit the Press and Visions International HERE.
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Like a Well of Sweet Water
 . 
That is your mailbox,
your name in black.
I want to leave you something
like a cat leaves her kill
at her master’s door.
I want to be useful
like a throat filled with song,
like a well of sweet water.
I am both cat and bird.
 . 
But what can I give?
My pockets are orphans,
my words have flown,
my head is filled
with useless music.
I would leave you something,
but not today.
The cat’s in the well
and the bird sings, sings.
 . 
Lori Powell
from Truth and Lies, Black Buzzard Press, © 2000
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1827

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