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Rushing

Posted in family, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2024| 10 Comments »

 . 
[ with 3 poems by Rae Spencer]
 . 
Adaptation
 . 
Some days I hardly remember
what it is to fly
 . 
what loss is
When morning feels like betrayal
and shoulders ache
with the sudden load of gravity
pressed into cruel bones
too human for wings
 . 
As if I never once awoke
hair smelling of clouds
wound in wild knots
and damp with tears
 . 
or slept
curled in a crevice of wind
 . 
Other days I recall myself
grace confined to memory
in which I have never flown
and it was only ever a tale
from childhood
I was never meant to believe
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A shift in warmth of Pacific seas, a wet winter in the South: throughout January a storm a week, sometimes two, but this afternoon we are braving mud to hike our favorite trail from Carter Falls to Grassy Creek. The little farm pond is full and we see the channel where it overflows to carve a deeper path through last summer’s grasses and sedges. Both white pine groves have evidence of freshets, scoured hardpan courses with needles layered thick along each side. We cross Martin Byrd Road to enter the woods that curve alongside the big cornfield and wonder what we’ll find. Even though the acres are planted in winter rye, how much soil has rushed off those slopes and furrows into Grassy Creek?
 . 
The trail quickly turns downhill and we see the storms’ impact. Red field clay has silted full the first drainage swale and overtopped it to rush down the trail bed in a boiling soupy froth. Exposed roots and deep mud. Our trail crews clean out these erosion control features twice a year but one wet January has damaged the trail more than ten years of hikers’ boots. Too much water, too much incline, too much gravity.
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep, writes Rae Spencer of water. It must seek its level, it must flow, it must rush. Water and time alike, each of them relentless and not to be held back. Have I spent too much of my life rushing? Have I abandoned will and wisdom to be always doing, doing? Even now my dreams are filled with urgency, long hallways, behind each door a patient fretting to be seen, and I with no hope of catching up. Waking from such, who would want to get out of bed and get started?
 . 
Better trail design can’t completely compensate for poor tillage and agricultural neglect, but the rest of today’s trail is actually in quite good shape. The outer berm has been mostly raked clear and there are several grade dips and rises that keep water from following the treadway. When we reach the more rustic forest bathing trail, it’s even better – consistent outsloping camber, plenty of runoff. Water’s gonna rush. Life too, I guess. How to prepare? How to respond? How to slow things down for a bit? A walk through quiet woods, a quiet hour with a book of poetry – maybe tonight my dreams will proceed more leisurely.
. 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Of Warbler and Quail
 . 
Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else
 . 
But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer
 . 
As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back
 . 
But this little warbler
outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear
 . 
Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent
 . 
Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore
 . 
Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks
 . 
That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar
 . 
And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars
 . 
Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail
 . 
Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Memory – home – loss – the path forward: Rae Spencer’s poetry has a distinctly formal feel as she settles deeply into these themes. Formal in the sense of meticulous language, lush natural imagery and description, architectural lines, internal rhyme. These poems need to be read slowly as they linger in the moment before releasing one to ponder and discover the writer’s metaphors, and discovering one’s own.
 . 
Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. I am perfectly happy to pause and listen with warbler and bobwhite as the poet weaves from their stories one of longing for home (Of Warbler and Quail). I think I’m ready now for racoon to teach me how to live (Adaptable). At the close of Doppler Effect, I sit and listen long to the change in pitch of life I know I must expect, and prepare for, as my own parents age and travel their final days.
 . 
Poetry, in its phrasing, its junctures, its juxtaposition, often moves at the pace of breath. Speak it aloud, pause when it needs you to. Stop and linger in the midst of these lines so that they may breathe into you.
 . 
❦
 . 
[hint: I re-type the poems for these posts (thank you to my freshman touch typing teacher), fingers slower than scanning eyes, speaking the words individually in my head, each syllable and carriage return (aka line break) – so often in the adagio the lines reveal secrets of how they mean.]
 . 
Rae Spencer lives in Virginia, USA. As well as writing, she is a practicing veterinarian. Of Warbler and Quail first appeared in Bolts of Silk. Gravity first appeared in vox poetica.
 . 
Watershed is available from Kelsay Books HERE. Learn more about Rae HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Gravity
 . 
Water doesn’t want
It only weighs
 . 
Neither will nor wisdom inform its seep
Downhill, settling to the lowest pool
 . 
Rivers cascade and marshes ooze
Toward inlet and gulf
Where tides surge
 . 
With the arid moon
Sere face lowered
In serene reflection
Over oblivious blue
 . 
Depths that teem with tin and polyp
Oyster clades awash in brine
That neither murmurs nor sighs
Through a shell
 . 
Held to the ear we hear
Blood’s heave
An eternal chorus
Singing sailors to sea
Dreamers to sleep
 . 
Daughters to voice
Their bare feet anchored
In restless churn
On heavy, ancient shores
 . 
Rae Spencer
from Watershed, Kelsay Books, American Fork, Utah; © 2023
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❦ ❦ ❦
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IMG_1948
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Foreshadowing

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2023| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by
Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]
 . 
For the Children
 . 
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up as we all
go down.
 . 
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
 . 
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
 . 
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
 . 
Gary Snyder
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.
 . 
Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.
 . 
Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.
 . 
Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?
 . 
Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
notes for the early journey
+++ for j.v.k.
 . 
somewhere along the way you will need to lean
over a bluff’s edge   drop you shoes and keep moving   use
the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide   if a
rainbow confuses you   which end   go the third
way   on the mountain you’ll remember   climb on
up to where the aspens tremble   you will be alone   these
high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags   but for you
 . 
there’s nothing to worry about   breathe   sniff the air like
a bloodhound and head the opposite way   find the
place where the land dissolves into sand   keep walking   when
that sand becomes sea   speak a bridge into being
I know you can do it   your father’s son ain’t
heard of can’t   follow the song   don’t stop until you’re south
of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine   I never
once stumbled on such a place   hard to say if a brown child
is the last four hundred years has had such
a luscious dream   day or night   but this is your mother’s
lullaby   I know she meant you to sleep sweet
 . 
Evie Shockley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.
 . 
This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words,  but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.
 . 
And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!
 . 
❦
 . 
More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order,  HERE
 . 
. .
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
What Kind of Times Are These
 . 
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
 . 
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
+++ be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
 . 
I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
 . 
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
 . 
Adrienne Rich
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
IMG_0768, tree
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What Is Required

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2023| 4 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Bob Wickless]
 . 
Not Wind, Not Water
+++++ In Memory of Rod Jellema
 . 
I would study, if I could, not wind
Nor water, but the silence after wind,
The scattering after second motion
 . 
On a darkened shore. Tests, if given,
Would consist of laying pages
End to end, the opening of endless
 . 
Information, movements on the beach
At dawn. Neither light nor darkness overall,
But the space of intersection . . .
 . 
The X between the film and camera
Where easy motion crosses over
One to the world. There I’d sit,
 . 
X’ed out, oblivious, yet hugely intelligent.
Schools of fish would soon dismiss me,
Flotsam would pass, failures survive,
 . 
But I, jetsam, drunk beyond knowledge,
Would float aimless, issuing assignments,
Collecting homework from the stars.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Not much to see here this time of year? But that’s exactly why we’ve come. While Linda and Margaret chase Bert down the wide camellia-lined promenades of the university garden, Josh and I take an inconspicuous side path. Not many folks meandering these narrow trails today. Winter-brown, bloomed-out, leaf-strewn: welcome to Native Plants.
 . 
Meadow, borders, understory, they draw us right in. Just a month ago these pale bristles, fuzzballs, and tufts  were brightly hued racemes, cymes, and corymbs. So inviting. Now begging for dispersal. I let my hand cup a stem and run up over the feathery head. I examine my palm – dozens of tiny seedlets, each with its stiff barbule. My, my — Josh just happens to have a sheaf of miniature brown envelopes in his shirt pocket. He hands me one and I dribble my catch into it. How many different species of goldenrod and aster? And we still have an entire little prairie to traverse.
 . 
A month after last April’s tornado crossed our neighborhood, after the cherry picker and chainsaws had gone home, after the ‘dozer had pushed two-ton trunks and root balls to the edge of our property past the Duke Energy cut, I imagined that the bare clay and churned up leaf mold would wait for winter, barren, when I could sow the half-acre with something new. But this summer the exposed earth received something it had patiently waited decades for. Sunlight. This fall the slope is a jostling upright congregation of pilewort and poke, and knee deep in damnable invasive stilt grass.
 . 
Best get to it. It’s a lot of square meters, but I have a fire rake and a 5-pound hazelhoe I use for trail workdays. And on the screened porch I have a bag of bags, cold stratifying, waiting for January and a smooth, raked bed: native silver plume grass, big bluestem, Indian grass my friend Joe gathered from his meadow on the Mitchell River; wingstem, crownbeard, ironweed I’ve been pulling during hikes along the MST; store-bought half-kilos of Southeast Wildflowers; and a little miniature brown envelope, stuffed full, and hand-labeled “Duke Mix.”
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Two Poems From School
1. Drawing Horses
 . 
There was one slow girl from grade two
And three, unable to multiplicate, ill-
At-ease, and long to devise, who tried
But tired of her dull and daily work,
Turned the smudge of your yellow page off
And began to draw horses.
 . 
Riderless, stream of those great manes back,
her horses rode out of no course but gladly off
The end of every page to the end of every class.
 . 
And when that girl died in a white hospital
Kicked by no horse but the one deep inside
Galloping over her frail, fourth grade hide,
I though I would try drawing horses. But I,
I was no good.
 . 
So girl, who never learned much from school
But taught me a daily grace in the movement
Of horses, these are for you.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When Bob Wickless signed my copy of The Secret Care the World Takes, he noted that while we have never met in person we share three things in common: poetry; North Carolina; the editorial generosity of Jack Kristofco at The Orchard Street Press. And a fourth thing – a year ago I featured Bob’s poem Prayer in Spring in another post extolling the wonders of native “weeds.”
 . 
Bob is from Maryland and has “held many jobs” in his lifetime, but he wisely retired to Reidsville NC to reside in “the writingest state.” Secret Care takes seriously the creative task of reminding us of what we all share in common. Bob leads his characters by the hand, introduces them to us, places our hand in theirs and waits quietly while we gaze into each other’s eyes. That tender connection may be wistful, it may be sad, but there is also humor in these poems. Laughter. Joy.
 . 
In the end may we become convinced that the World does care for us. Perhaps we may feel the tug to care also for the World and what it contains, what it nurtures, what it brings forth. Through the magic of poetry, this care is no longer secret.
 . 
❦
 . 
Check out The Orchard Street Press, its annual contest and anthology, Quiet Diamonds, and order Bob Wickless’s book HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Solstice: The Children’s Ward
 . 
The secret care the world takes
Has pressed closed all the petals
Of tiny summer flowers
As if darkness might infuse
Those dying colors
With some thing they did not mean,
Some statement thy did not possess,
Some dream they could never intend.
 . 
It is in the same way rain,
Or even the thought of rain
Oncoming, turns up a maple’s leaves
Like fragile buckets –
Or a whole forest of maples,
A hundred, thousand, children’s hands
Raised in anticipation
Of the sky’s sweet promise.
 . 
And it is evident, too, the easy way
You breathe, so effortlessly in sleep,
How your small, secret bodies know,
Always, exactly what is required
Of this world and the next
To simply sleep
A sleep simple enough
To trust all your flowers to love.
 . 
Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
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