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Crooked

Posted in family, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature, nature photography, Robert Bly, Sourwood, Stephen Dunn on September 19, 2025| 6 Comments »

[poems by Stephen Dunn, Robert Bly, Bill Griffin]

Circular

Daylight illuminated, but only for those

who had some knowing in their seeing,

and night fell for everyone, but harder

for some. A belief in happiness bred

despair, though despair could be assuaged

by belief, which required faith,

which made those who had it

one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

Love at noon that was still love at dusk

meant doubt had been subjugated

for exactly that long, and best to have music

to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy.

Those alone spoke to their dogs,

but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness

of air, while those together were left

to address the wall or open door of each other.

Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,

some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.

Daylight concealed, but only for those

fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up

earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.

How we saw it was how it was.

Stephen Dunn (1939-2021)

Shenandoah, Volume 52, Number 3; Fall 2002

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Josh has taught me how to spot a sourwood across the meadow along the treeline. Always crooked. Curved and arched, clutching branches and trunk like an old man’s spine, in medical parlance kyphosis. It must be because the sourwood is grasping at something always out of reach. Always overtaken by shadow but always trying to edge closer into the light.

When we bought this house in 1983 the steep back lot was choked with hickory and tuliptree; in front, two weighty red oaks flanked the door, centenarian sentries. A dogwood struggled in their shade and at the northern lot line one sourwood straggled out from under. Crooked! That first summer I noticed, of all the trees in leaf, only the sourwood labored with tent caterpillars, messy tangled webbing and bare patches chewed out of its foliage. I though maybe I should try to save old sourwood from its pests, but they were too high for me to spray and I had no spare cash for an arborist. Oxydendrum arboreum, you are on your own.

After Hurricane Hugo walloped the Appalachians in 1989, we cut down those two oaks that leaned two threatening meters from our walls and roof. At the base they were bigger around than oil drums. A few years after those monsters came down I noticed the sourwood, not standing any straighter but now stretching a new arm pure vertical, due upward, sunward. Another thirty years along and that sourwood is still making flowers in the spring, champion of honeybees, and still sharing its bright summer green with any and all itinerant webworms. The dogwood and redbud look up and pay homage from around its knees. But even with all the newfound light my sourwood remains crooked as hell.

Teach me the same lesson, Josh and Sourwood. Life ain’t ever going to get cobbled together perfect. Most mornings I have to claw through a web of nasty wormsilk before I can struggle up from sleep. Most days I’m noticing the weeds and cankers I haven’t yet yanked from my beds more than I’m noticing the asters’ spiral floret emerging or bumblebees’ shanks stuffed with pollen. Step back. Look again. Forgive the mess of life just making its daily living. Forgive the darkness that less hides the light than shows it brighter. Forgive myself that I can’t fix it all, make it come out straight. Forgive my own crookedness. Isn’t that what makes the sourwood a sourwood?

Oxydendrum arboreum

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What Things Want

You have to let things

Occupy their own space.

This room is small,

But the green settee

Likes to be here.

The big marsh reeds,

Crowding out the slough,

Find the world good.

You have to let things

Be as they are.

Who knows which of us

Deserves the world more?

Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/what-things-want

❦ ❦ ❦

Sourwood

Bent from overshadowing,

+++++ crippled

by the broad red oak;

tent caterpillars, years

+++++ of limp submission,

robbed of flowers

by heartless shade.

Rocky soil, no tap root, many winters:

the big red finally kneels, prostrates itself,

and Spring delivers sun to sourwood.

Straight up tangent to the curve of trunk

+++++ new arms jubilate,

new fingers reach to pull down sky, bees

celebrate creamy clusters

and there is honey.

Bill Griffin

featured in Poetry in Plain Sight 2014 by the Winston Salem Writers.

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Wingstem & Bill

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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.

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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).