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[with 3 poems by Julie Suk]
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We’re Small on the Rim
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of comprehension, but that shouldn’t distract
us from the fig tree
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bent by fleshy globes on the verge of fall,
seed exposed where the fruit splits.
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And there are the aunts
leaning over a cast-iron kettle filled
with sugar, spices, and a curl of lemon zest –
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figs stewing, jars lined up, the ladle lifted
for a sample sip –
++++ never mind the times my lips were burned
++++ by a sweetness giving more than I gave back.
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Hold out your hand for the unseen
my grandfather said.
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There, the universe,
a potpourri of energy lit by colorful fires
that sparked me to life,
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++++ accident though it was,
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limb of the fig tree scratching the house,
on the table, a spoon.
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Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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I am crying for the beauty of these trees. An upwelling of emotion? A brain response slung through limbic system from temporal lobe because of certain inverted images on my retina? No, a watery reaction to pollen. Hazel catkins stirring in the breeze. An itch, a sneeze. But still I am crying for the beauty of these little trees.
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How one says a thing is more important that what one says. We stop along the nature trail to notice this unequivocal manifestation of Spring – drooping yellow pollen catkins on American Hazelnut, full and fertile long before any leaves appear. These are the male flowers. Where are the female? Solitary at the tips of limbs and buds, discover a few spidery red florets no bigger than your little fingernail. From these tiny nubs the nuts will form and we can eat them in September if we beat the squirrels. As I point out the female flowers, how they point mostly outward and upward away from the catkins, I catch myself before blurting this explanation: “They’re designed to prevent self pollination.”
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Designed? The Hazels worked out this arrangement of their own volition? Or had it planned for them de novo on some cosmic drawing board? Oh Evolution, how you embrace the random and non-linear, and how we struggle to grasp such a universe. I gulp and begin a different tack. “Self pollination increases the risk of recessive traits and may weaken the line. Over many, many generations, the Hazel trees that happen to grow with their little red flowers poised to catch pollen blown in from a neighbor tree are more likely to have strong offspring that can pass that trait along.”
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And does that explain why I cry for the beauty of these trees? All these trees? The red maples are already dropping their polleniferous bundles as winged seeds unspool from female flowers. Stony hickory nuts are still discoverable beside the trail from last fall’s excellent mast season. The green furze we spy at the ridgeline’s crown is tuliptrees’ earliest budbreak. The trees speak their names in the space they fill. They give their promises almost silently but always sure. There seems no end to the means my own species can devise to make the world harsh, hateful, ugly. There is no end to the beauty of these trees. I cry.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Dream It Was
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Gone, the apples left last night for the deer –
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shadows lighter than the night they passed through,
rune-like hoof marks carving the frosted lawn.
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Like a dream,
but touch is my familiar.
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May you and I morph into other bodies that meet
once this one goes
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on and on into the blue heights – old trails
like those deer use around the girth of a mountain.
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And after breath evaporates
may the words left without a tongue
fall into the pool where we swam,
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the cold waters rushing back warm.
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Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Hold out your heart for the unseen. When there are no longer lips, a mouth, to hold our words may they pool in the places we loved. May we meet again on the blue heights, on some new trail, on a very old trail. What voice would you choose in your next life? Listen for me, a song of wind thin in the high branches.
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❦
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What would the new day hold for us if each morning we were astonished to wake? Dogwood scratches the window as wind picks up. Throaty testosterone rumbles as the teenager across the street starts his pickup to head to school. What could urge me out of bed instead of surrendering to warmth and pulling the covers higher? But this is a new day, the vernal equinox in fact. I confess I have reached the time of life when I can see the days ticking on ahead of me are finite in number.
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Turning each page in Julie Suk’s Astonished to Wake is a reminder that new days are in short supply. Perhaps this one will weave its meaning from days treasured in their remembering. Perhaps this one would prefer to eat me raw. Perhaps this is the day I really will wake up and notice every person that has made my life, and even tell them so. A good book of poetry compels one to turn each page, then the next. A great book of poetry compels one to set the book aside and enter the newness of this day.
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❦
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From Charlotte, NC, and former managing editor of Southern Poetry Review, Julie Suk has been a beacon in the world for poetry for decades. R. T. Smith writes, “The poetry of Julie Suk is at once deceptively spare and metaphorically rich, and the sensual mystery of her perfectly pitched and etched lines is haunting, elemental, and wild.” Her many awards include the Brockman-Campbell Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Astonished to Wake is Julie’s sixth collection, published by Jacar Press.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Music
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When my father was young, he played the violin,
his mother, the rosewood Grand.
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She also had a voice clear and sweet,
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also had tuberculosis and died
when my father was thirteen.
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He never played again, but loved music,
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the Victrola making its rounds,
or the two of us listening to opera on the radio.
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No noise allowed in the house when Rosa Ponselle sang.
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In my next life I want the voice of a violin.
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Tell me what you’d like played
and I’ll speak from the key of love and pain,
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how the living are echoes of the past,
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my grandmother staring into the darkness – as I do now,
thinking of those I must leave.
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Talking into the night,
we’ll hold sorrow up close and let it weep.
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Julie Suk
from Astonished to Wake, Jacar Press, Durham NC; © 2016
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❦ ❦ ❦
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