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[two poems from Intervale]
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Poem from November
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The leaves have fallen, releasing the distances.
This year of my turning moves
in an arc like a preying bird’s,
purposeful.
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My loves have dried. I find
I can remember only the least things:
mouse-gray of my grandmother’s hair
dead in the silverbacked brush,
the smell of hardpacked dirt
under black grease in the smokehouse.
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Here is the old sky, the one we always had.
Everything in it is small,
punctuation for a vanished story.
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I have forgotten the trick
an old man taught me: how the voice
can be made to nest in the cupped hands,
calling. Was it the dove
or the owl I brought close then?
There was a calling.
Something came.
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❀ ❀ ❀
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Penumbra
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The child in the cracked photograph sits still
in the rope swing hung from a live oak.
Her velvet dress brims with a lace frill.
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Her pet Bantam is quiet in her lap.
It is the autumn day of a funeral
and someone has thought to take a snap-
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shot of the child who won’t be allowed
to go to the burying – the coffin in the house
for days, strange people going in and out.
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She’s dressed as if she’d go, in the blue church-
dress from last Christmas, almost too short.
The rooster loves her, she guards his perch
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on her lap, his colors feathering the mild air.
She concentrates on this, now that her father
is unknowable, crying in his rocking chair.
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Her mouth knife-thin, her small hands knotted hard
on the ropes she grips as if to be rescued.
She’s growing a will that won’t be shed
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and something as cold as winter’s breath
tightens in her, as later the asthma’s vise
will tighten – hands on the throat, the truth.
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Black and white, she is hiding
in every one of my bright beginnings.
Gold and deep blue and dark-shining
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red the cockerel’s feathers, gold the sun
in the skyblue southern fall, blue
over the four o’clocks and the drone
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of weeping that drains like a shadow from the house
where someone is gone, is gone, is gone –
where the child will stay to darken like a bruise.
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I am six years old, buried
in the colorless album.
My mother is dead.
I forgive no one.
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Betty Adcock
from Intervale: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA; © 2001
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This is the season of perfect-family photos arriving by text after reunions for feasting or bursting from the envelopes of early Christmas cards. These cousins with their complimentary sweaters on the front steps, their lovely smiling children and companions. I spent the first day with my father after our dual week-long Covid quarantine helping him watch a home movie from 1936, his little sister on a tricycle, he barefoot astride his cousin’s pony. His aunts and grandmother crossed in the greytone background like hovering angels or benevolent wardens. And then the next reel, in color, my father in white t-shirt is twenty-six and I am a flame-haired infant in my grandfather’s arms.
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These two poems and others in this collection by Betty Adcock take me deeper than I’ve ever labored into my own past. She sees everything. What no one but she had yet noticed, the voices, the smells, all are now alive in her sharp, unsentimental, raven-eyed truth telling. What memories are waiting half-asleep for each of us? What memories call us to create them fresh from fragments and tales and slowly disintegrating histories? A few words from Betty Adcock and forgotten ghosts materialize. There was a calling. Something came.
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❀
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Betty Adcock (b. 1938) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She has taught and served as writer-in-residence in the state for many decades. Among her numerous awards and publications, this comment by Mary Oliver stands out: Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.” (for The Difficult Wheel, 1995)
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Intervale and Betty Adcock’s other books are available from LSU PRESS.
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Another poem by Betty Adcock at Verse and Image:
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Thank you for visiting VERSE and IMAGE:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or two poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
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Thanks again for joining the conversation.
. – Bill
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
You are planting wonderful seeds. ---B