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Bookshelves

Posted in Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2025| 5 Comments »

 . 
[with 4 poems by Robert Morgan]
 . 
Foxfire
 . 
Bright lace on the darkness grows
heavy as the meat of lightning bugs
crushed on bark, rotting leaves.
*
Flakes of the moon stuck to spongy logs.
*
Seconds sprinkled from a luminous dial on bearskin.
*
Glow worms crawl all night in stump water
without moving. St. Elmo’s fire.
Foxfire swims like fish of the deepest troughs.
*
City lights seen from a bomber.
*
the eyes of dead wood stare like jack-o-lanterns
burning last year’s sun
after a wet spell.
*
Coals of unlife,
chilly owls.
 . 
Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Zirconia Poems, Lillabulero Press; © 1969
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
When I was a Junior in High School I was going steady with the daughter of our town’s elementary school librarian. If you think Linda’s house wasn’t filled to the rafters with books, you’ve got another think coming. When we were in college, still dating, I decided for Christmas I would build her bookshelves.
 . 
During Junior High all the seventh grade boys took Home Ec with the girls and all the girls took Wood Shop with the boys. I got an A in sock darning and jello salad; on my woodworking project, a sculpture of a fish in walnut, I got a B+. Seven years later I gathered pine planks and 1×2’s in our basement to devise the Christmas present. Measure twice, cut once? Not so much as I recall, although I do remember wood glue, finishing nails, Minwax stain and varnish. Steel wool between coats. Linda seemed to like her present. Enough to marry me a year later and move the shelves to our 3rd floor apartment on Duke Street in Durham.
 . 
That little book case was not fine cabinetry, but the shelves didn’t sag beneath Linda’s textbooks: history, art, religion, all the heaviest stuff. My design was basic, mostly a ladder, something we and the years might climb together, or maybe an altar where she could cherish and display her first and truest loves. It was good as I could make it, the only thing I knew to build.
 . 
What did I know of all we and the years would build? The propagating books we’d carry home to become our family? Children grow and leave and carry their children back to you for an afternoon, but books are always close at hand to read to grandchildren like we read them to the grandchildren’s parents. A child is here for but a moment but bright spines and colored pages rest and wait for their return.
 . 
My work was not to build a house, or a home, or even rooms, but simply room enough for something she would never finish loving. Every birthday, every holiday, another book; any old occasion is fit time to add to the welcome weight of pages. They fill the hours and our hearts – and I foresee there will never be quite enough shelves for all.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Very Old Man
Hounds bay in his breath,
face a wilderness, eyes like frozen fountains.
He speaks from a foreign country, words drunk
with exhaustion, wornout
habits of the tongue.
His shoulders are small as a child’s.
 . 
Sits on the cold peak watching us climb,
or doesn’t bother.
 . 
 . 
Elegy
 . 
Guess I’ll light a rag out of here, he said
and blindness rose in his open eyes.
 . 
Tilted chessmen, tombstones graze on the hill,
drag shadows at the setting moon.
Eighty years go down
 . 
like a ship.
 . 
Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Zirconia Poems, Lillabulero Press; © 1969
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Saturday, September 15, 2001: Robert Morgan has managed to travel to Southern Pines to read at Weymouth Center before the North Carolina Poetry Society. So healing, so encouraging to us fellow mortals; I remember his tone and demeanor more than I remember his words, but many of his words have never left me. Actually, his words have grown in me and flourished. Audubon’s Flute – I have to pull that one out and read it every Earth Day.
 . 
Audubon in the summer woods
by the afternoon river sips
his flute, his fingers swimming on
the silver as silver notes pour
 . 
by the afternoon river, sips
and fills the mosquito-note air
 . 
So many notes before and after that morning in Weymouth Woods, so many words. No wonder that when I learn that Press 53 has collected Robert Morgan’s first four books of poetry into a single volume, I hear the silver tones calling me. In the lyrical introduction to Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Robert M. West shares this quotation: Asked, ‘What is the highest praise that could be given to a poet’s work, southern or otherwise?’ Morgan responded, “ ‘You must read this.’ The greatest honor is to be read.”
 . 
And so we shall read and honor Robert Morgan. I am picking up his book every day for the next several weeks, and we will see where the music leads us.
 . 
❦
Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, with an introduction by Robert M. West (co-editor of Robert Morgan: Essays on the Life and Work), is a Carolina Classics Edition from Press 53, available HERE.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Distances
 . 
Mind wanders down the long slope of trees
like small cat fur
turning blue in the midday sunlight of December
into a short valley
with only a cabin and a juniper
and one horse nibbling the dried grass
around an Indian grave.
 . 
Clear through the distance of memory
into the cabin where my great grandmother, a bride
sits by the fire smoking her clay pipe
and watching through the door the gap in the mountains
where her man may come any moment
with gun on shoulder and quail swinging
and steps so rhythmic
they leave tracks in the mind.
 . 
Robert Morgan
from Collected Early Poems of Robert Morgan, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC; Carolina Classics Editions; © 2024
originally published in Zirconia Poems, Lillabulero Press; © 1969
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 
IMG_0768, tree

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Everything New

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2025| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Ralph Earle]
 . 
The Body’s Small Purposes
 . 
His lungs like exhausted fishermen
drew in their glittering catch
of oxygen and his heart
called to the receding tides of the blood.
His bony fingers curled around mine.
I read from Mary Oliver
 . 
how the soul may be hard, necessary,
yet almost nothing, how we all know
the sand is golden under the cold waves
though our hands can never touch it.
 . 
The hearing goes last, the doctor said.
 . 
There are not words for this communion,
this hope that his eyes, turned from
the sunny branches outside, could summon
a vision of loved ones long gone,
wife of fifty years, sister dead in childbirth,
souls knowing already this passage
and awaiting him in whatever form of glory
the living can conjure: my brothers, me,
our children, all the others
still casting the nets of our breath,
still sifting the golden sands.
 . 
Once in his search for love after my mother died
he told me it never ends. But it does.
On a broken day the breath stops
and the cells gently fall asleep
and the soul, perhaps puzzled
by this coming to rest
of all the body’s small purposes
rises and looks on the silence.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
After I sit through lunch in the nursing home dining room with him and his friend, Dad and I roll back to his room to hang out for an hour or two. Maybe he tells me about the birds that have discovered the feeders I set up outside his window – he can name most of them. He always offers me something from his overflowing snack drawer – it began as his sock drawer but over three months the socks have all had to find new digs. If I prompt him he’ll recall talking to his sister on the phone last Sunday, or he’ll show me a card someone sent. This is his home now.
 . 
When Dad returned to his townhouse from the hospital after his fall in July, we called Hospice. For a week he barely ate, barely knew us. We set up dual hospital beds so he and Mom could continue to share a bedroom like they had for just shy of 74 years. She would sit and hold his hand for hours, couldn’t bear to have him out of sight, but once told us, “There’s a man in a coma in my bedroom.” He was home only three weeks before she died, but during their last days together he certainly knew her. They ate a few bites together. Watched the news. When she was gone, although the house was never empty it was completely empty.
 . 
“Good as new,” just what does that mean? Six months after Dad’s fall he can get himself out of bed by himself, putter himself down the hall in his wheelchair using his feet like Fred Flintstone, polish off his lunch. He wins quarters at bingo. Today he and I play our weekly Rummikub, exercise for the little gray cells. Last week he beat me for the first time. Right now we’re each down to just two tiles remaining until I draw the winning combo – for a second I consider feigning a bad draw to give him a couple more chances for victory, but nah, I win.
 . 
And at this very moment the activities coordinator sticks her head around the door to remind Dad – a local church has arrived to share a worship service this weekday afternoon. Dad, I’ll pack up the game if you want to attend. We hug, he rolls himself away. I dump the tiles into their case, stash it on his dresser, put on my jacket, and by the time I walk down the hall Dad is out of sight.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Cormorants Arrive
 . 
Like a gang of legislators
+++ dressed in grey
+++ +++ from somewhere
 . 
outside of town,
+++ the cormorants loiter
+++ +++ on the lake’s little float
 . 
strutting a step or two,
+++ dropping
+++ +++ into the water
 . 
for a fish.
+++ The represent
+++ +++ some constituency
 . 
I don’t recognize,
+++ shuffling around
+++ +++ their little island.
 . 
They disturb me,
+++ they embody my fear
+++ +++ of narrow minds,
 . 
of self-assured
+++ self-inflated strangers,
+++ +++ fear of my own silence.
 . 
Still, when I approach
+++ they dwindle
+++ +++ into a smattering
 . 
of awkward fishing birds,
+++ all angle and tackle, waiting
+++ +++ their moment of excitement,
 . 
the shadow of small prey
+++ out of reach
+++ +++ in the darkening water.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
They are here. They are gone. Does Ralph Earle mean the birds, flock of black specks flapping, or does he mean the curses his wife calls to herself? Is nothing permanent, not grief, not joy? Everything You Love is New – perhaps it is your love that makes something new, or seem new in that moment of loving, that wonderful fleeting moment when you know you can’t hold something forever and yet you are able to rest in not having to.
 . 
So delicate — Ralph Earle’s poems touch ever lightly all the heavy things we encounter as human creatures. How we do all hurt each other after all, sometimes careless but sometimes intentional. How the things we imagine will bring us joy fall to dust. How apt we are sometimes to turn away rather than reach out. Yes . . . but. These are not poems of despair but of awareness, of acceptance, and sometimes of bright heart-swelling discovery and joy. Reading a poem requires a pause, a brief silence. The mind as it embraces that silence creates an opportunity to fill it with love.
 . 
A damselfly, so delicate, hovers above the mirror of pond. Her abdomen curls to touch the water’s surface so lightly there is no ripple, yet she leaves behind an egg that may become a new damselfly. Perhaps everything you love makes you new.
 . 
❦
 . 
Ralph Earle’s new full-length collection Everything You Love is New is available from Redhawk Publications.
 . 
Read an additional poem by Ralph Earle at last week’s post, Tenacity.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Birthday Ending in Zero
 . 
No rain for days, and on the pollen-dusted porch
a vase of flowers arrived from nowhere:
 . 
yellow roses, lilies, carnations, tulips with orange tips
and stems of electric-blue buds like paper lanterns.
 . 
We were happy in that second Covid spring, gathering
our loved ones on Zoom, cooking fish with asparagus,
 . 
ate our apple pie and still it didn’t rain. In the pollen
on the back deck, small animals left yellow footprints.
 . 
That week, after so long alone, you let go
into the space we had begun to share.
 . 
You stood the flowers on the kitchen table
surrounded with gifts and letters from my friends.
 . 
Our hearts opened like small animals looking around.
We slept skin to skin, your presence rippling like a lake.
 . 
That week the huge heads of the roses unfolded
in radiance even as the water started to cloud,
 . 
even as carnations drooped and tulip petals dropped.
When the rain began I found a ravine where no one goes
 . 
and under the trees, scatted the globes of the roses,
tulips with their falling petals, lilies and lanterns.
 . 
Ralph Earle
from Everything You Love is New, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2019-02-09
 . 

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Tenacity

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2025| 7 Comments »

January 1, 2025 — Henbit

 . 
[with 3 poems from Main Street Rag]
 . 
The Morning of the Unfinished Coffee
 . 
Lightning, thunder, righteous
downpour clatters on the roof.
I fetch in the newspaper,
heavy as a sack of dough.
Good Morning BLues on the radio.
I brew the coffee and go to settle
on the sofa when my wife,
she of the new hip replacement,
thumps in on her walker,
trailing unslept pain.
The fridge we just had repaired,
on the fritz again, 60̊.
Dry ice kept the cooler
cool but froze her half and half.
“Pop, the sugar bowl is empty.”
No amends can suffice.
8:15. She stirs her coffee,
I get on the horn to the repair guy.
She slide-bumps her walker
past the unmade bed,
the blinking leg-pump machine,
the warm ice packs.
I stare out the kitchen window.
Will the repair guy never call?
Her PT is due at 9:00,
so I don’t walk to the corner store
for dry news of Gaza’s wounds.
I imagine the waterlogged blood.
The paper won’t tell this truth,
that her second cup
chills on the counter, or that
I cry as I empty it in the sink.
 . 
Ricks Carson, Atlanta GA
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
New Year’s Day – I park at the Rec Center to take a walk on the Elkin Nature Trail. Sun’s out but the air temp is just a few degrees above freezing and last night it dipped into the teens. These are the days when one feels the North in North Carolina. Bare trees, frosted fields, uninterrupted carpet of brown beside the woodland trail, this is all the nature you are permitted on a winter nature walk.
 . 
But what’s this? In an unkempt bed surrounded by concrete curb, in backfill from last summer’s paving project and scarcely qualifying as “earth,” here is a low dust-hugging froth of green waving in the biting breeze. And not only green but specks of pink and purple. I squat. Blossoms smaller than a peanut, little mouths of dotted mauve, they sing some perverse love song to the slant sunlight. Flowers in January.
 . 
My God, Henbit, is there a month when you don’t bloom? Colonizer from Europe since colonial days, non-native naturalized citizen, lure for early pollinators and considered tasty by chickens, even I have made a salad of you though you’re not my favorite. So here’s your chlorophyll chugging away, frost warning be damned. Here are pink pinhead buds lining up to yawn wide for the hardiest bee-ling. My nose is dripping and my fingertips are blue but you just look way, way too happy.
 . 
O Henbit, Lamia amplexicaule, Mint Family, I can see I need a warmer coat and a couple ounces of your tenacity.
 . 

January 1, 2025 — Spiny Sow Thistle

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Frank Dribble a Tennis Ball
 . 
I’ve never seen the old man playing,
only complaining about the neighbors,
 . 
immigrants, taxes, traffic, and the dogs
that piss on his pink peonies.
 . 
The tennis ball gets away from him,
bounces downhill toward his basement door.
 . 
He chases it five yards and stops,
as if he suddenly remembers his age.
 . 
I wave. Frank doesn’t remember me,
but he waves back at strangers now.
 . 
I see him often without his toupee,
wearing the same red flannel pajamas,
 . 
checking his mailbox ten times a day
like a twelve-year-old looking for a gift.
 . 
His wife opens the front door, shouts to Frank,
Stay near the house where I can see you.
 . 
Frank waves. I not to his ghostly universe:
Forgotten ball, empty mailbox, strangers.
 . 
Terry Huff, Brentwood TN
from The Main Street Rag, Vol 29 Nr 4, Fall 2024, Edinboro PA; © 2024 The Main Street Rag Publishing Company
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Before I write this I head to the basement where I know I’ve stashed a big plastic bin. Ah, here it is, Vol 4 Nr 4 1999, the first issue of Main Street Rag Poetry Journal I ever bought. Five bucks, 72 pages, saddle stapled. I lay it beside my latest copy, Vol 29 Nr 4, 126 pages, perfect bound and hefty. Nine dollars, discounted to subscribers. If I took a book-finding expedition throughout the house, all these groaning shelves and random piles, if I look behind and under, I imagine I could find every issue spanning that twenty-five years. Oh yeah, and I read them all, too.
 . 
Tenacity, from the proto-Indo-European root ten-, which produces the Latin verbs tenere “to hold, grasp,” and tendere “to stretch:” sometimes you just have to do both. I open my dictionary to tenacity and find a photo of M. Scott Douglass. The average lifespan of a small press poetry journal is probably somewhere between Mayfly and Pet Hamster. How does founder, editor, designer, and chief mailroom clerk Scott Douglass do it? I flip the Wayback to 1999 and flip the little book to page 63, Ralph Earle’s Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD, and Taste Our Simple Pleasures, and damn, they’re just as good as when I circled their titles in the table of contents 25 years ago.
 . 
Poetry for the regulars on Main Street. What you’ll discover in these pages every three months is mostly everything that makes us human: family and crisis; love and sex; society and politics; satire, some snark, and a few decent chuckles; clear mornings and long sleepless nights. What you won’t find is Hallmark, and you definitely won’t find incomprehensible wordsplats that don’t have the sense they were born with.
 . 
I’ve been trying to learn to write poetry for twenty-five years, and still learning. The only thing I’m sure about after all that travail is that to write it you’ve got to read it. So now see here, M. Scott, I’ve got just one more thing to say to you – thanks.
 . 
❦
 . 
Scott and Jill have pulled up stakes in Charlotte NC and moved back to Pennsylvania to be closer to family. End of an era. Who is going to hold all of our feet to the fire? The Main Street Rag will live on, however, reincorporated and with a business address of Edinboro, PA. Last week I was scanning weather maps to see how Linda’s family in Pittsburgh and Cleveland were going to fare during the big winter storm. The graphic of inches of expected snow showed 4 here, 6 there, and smack dab over Edinboro a big fat 8. Someone who’s grown up in western Pennsylvania will scoff and say, Eight inches, pshaw, let me tell you about the time . . . Nevertheless, Scott, please get the teenagers to shovel the drive.
 . 
And you can read back issues and subscribe right HERE:
 . 

January 1, 2025 — Common Groundsel

 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD
 . 
You find yourself in the lounge
drinking a Brandy Alexander
trying to stay calm. At your elbow
a kid with red hair stares at this fingers,
a Swiss flag sewed to his
army jacket back.
 . 
He is into prophecies, like you,
reads a lot of Jesus, likes Habakkuk
and Jonah, too. When he says something sharp
about the end of Jack the Baptist, you relax
and with a few fast facts show
that Jeremiah foresaw
the current catastrophe
and though old Nero
is sharp as a Philistine’s eye tooth
it was noble Augustus
really had the moves.
 . 
The kid’s attention drifts
to the TV hanging in darkness:
bread and circuses
live
from the Coliseum.
 . 
Ralph Earle, Durham NC
from Main Street Rag Poetry Journal, Vol 4 Nr 4, Winter 1999, Charlotte NC; © 1999 Main Street Rag Poetry Journal
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 
[AFTERWORD: This morning (Wed. Jan. 8) I finished editing Tenacity, added the photos and captions, and put it to bed until Friday Jan. 10 for posting. This afternoon I reached for the next book in my stack and opened Ralph Earle’s new collection, Everything You Love is New. There on page 15 is Beirut Holiday Inn, 67 AD. Total serendipity and cosmic congruence. The only change is that old Nero is now Caligula. Thanks, Ralph! Now to start choosing poems for Jan. 17! — Bill G]
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