Pat Riviere-Seel | V E R S E and I M A G E

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Pocket Knife

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged Because I Did Not Drown, Bill Griffin, imagery, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poets, Pat Riviere-Seel, poetry, Southern writing on June 13, 2025| 10 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]

Wander Until You Find the Trail Back

How insistent the world wakes you,

Daylight pushes through dense blinds.

A one-note bird insists on an answer.

Always the same pulsing – waking – wanting

to know what next? How to parse a life

caught in mid-flight, the light a web woven

in the night. All the things we never talk about.

We let the stories we tell ourselves define us.

What would we be without the myths?

Desire contains ire. De- as in deconstruct,

dismantle the dire. Desire nothing. Construct

your own lifeline. Getting lost may be the last

best thing that ever happens.

Pat Riviere-Seel

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I think I know where I’ve been and I imagine I know where I’m going. But do I really know anything? I certainly don’t know where this narrative is going. Josh and I are sitting beside a rutted gravel track eating lunch. It’s the last meal of our last day on the trail. Sometime this afternoon a banged up old van will arrive to carry us all back to base camp. While the boys joke around and my co-leaders snooze, I gather some of the trash left by previous loungers and eaters. I lift a sandwich wrapper and discover a pocket knife.

The summer of 1969 Linda and I started going together. About a week after we held hands for the first ime – had we even kissed yet? – I got on a bus in Akron at 5 AM with three fellow Boy Scouts to spend two weeks at Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Now it’s the summer of 1983 and our own two kids are teenagers. Josh, our eldest, and I have just finished ten days of hiking Philmont together with his troop – desert plateau and Ponderosa pine forests, rushing gorges and a 12,000 foot peak. Our big adventure is ending. I stuff refuse into my sandwich bag and discover that pocket knife.

In the summer of 2025 I rummage my desk to return that knife to my pocket. I can’t find it. Turn out the pockets of all my pants, upend my day pack, creep beneath the desk and out to the car under all the seats – not there. I have often pictured the Boy Scout who lost that fine, top-of-the-line Swiss Army Scout’s knife. He had sat there on the ground eating lunch the day before I did. The knife stealthily squeezed its way out of his pocket. He littered his garbage on the knife and never missed it until that night. Too late. Karma. He violated the ethic of Leave No Trace and relinquished his knife to me, diligent trash picker. And such a knife – lock-blade, screw driver & awl, little tweezers and trademark Victorinox toothpick. I will carry it for over forty years, sharpen it and oil it, admire it every time I pull it out and wonder at my worthiness.

Now I’m imagining someone else finding my knife, excuse me, our knife. Beside a hiking trail where I had squatted to identify a flower? In a parking lot stuck to tar? Appreciate it. Or don’t. I held it for a good long time. This is letting go.

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How to Rebuild Community

Coming out of the pandemic

+++ I’m having trouble

knowing how to act.

+++ This new landscape

more hardscrabble than highway,

+++ a tightrope walk

not a garden promenade.

When I offer my outstretched hand

+++ to a woman

I’ve just met, she fixes me

+++ with a chilly stare, says,

I don’t shake hands anymore.

+++ And suddenly I’m ashamed

of my bacteria-filled palm, its brazen

+++ need for connection.

Is it also infected with The Virus? I’m tempted

+++ to rush away, down the hall

and lather that offending hand

+++ with hot sudsy water, the way

we scrubbed our vegetables not so long ago.

How do I move from cautious

+++ to community?

The knitters know. When they notice

+++ the chaos in the coffee shop,

the customers shouting out orders,

+++ the din around them rising like bread,

impossible to ignore,

+++ Jane stitches herself

to the cash register,

+++ Linda begins bagging cookies

Cathy slices strawberry cake. Their hands

+++ smooth the angry air

grown thick with impatience

+++ and want.

The knitters’ hands fly like needles –

+++ knit one, purl two,

opening, closing, shaping. Each palm

+++ holds a single need to serve.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

Pat Riviere-Seel writes and writes and writes. Has written, is writing, will write. A solid lifetime of essays, poetry, technical pieces, editing, teaching – her life has been creating with words. Because I Did Not Drown is a portmanteau of Pat’s life, her writing life, her life in writing. A memoir fits pieces into a whole – dates and sequences, family and relationships, loves and desires. A good memoir colors them all with the deeper hues of the soul – fear and disappointment, aspirations and joy. This memoir achieves all that plus one more thing: the crystalline beauty awakened by poetry. Each memory in prose is accompanied by one or two poems. Poems touch and reveal the soul of these moments in Pat’s life.

I discover myself in these poems, not as outward subject but inward seeker. I often find that I more fully inhabit and participate in the lines of a poem that in a paragraph of prose. The distilled essence of poetry is like volatile spirit that shoots straight from tongue to consciousness. Wonderfully intoxicating. A draught that frees and connects. Next time we meet, Pat and I, we shall surely dance.

❦

I can still see that knife. I thought to replace it but the model is no longer manufactured and someone wants eighty bucks on Ebay for one like it. Plus it wouldn’t be the object found, the discovery, the reward. Nevertheless, I can still see that knife because this week I found it shoved in the back of a drawer. Where is this narrative going? Is nothing ever truly lost that once occupied a space in one’s heart? Bosh! Or perhaps the finding is the thing rather than the thing that’s found. Tomorrow I will sit to eat a sandwich with my son and I won’t be able to keep myself from peaking beneath the napkin.

❦

Because I Did Not Drown by Pat Riviere-Seel, a memoir in prose and verse, is available from Main Street Rag Enterprises.

Selected poems from previous books by Pat Riviere-Seel:

The Serial-Killer’s Daughter (2009)

Nothing Below But Air (2014)

When There Were Horses (2021)

❦ ❦ ❦

Astonished

+++ for SLM

how since your death

the natural world keeps itself,

kaleidoscopic, the brilliant shimmer,

sunlight silvering bay leaves, the veins

of water oak, the dogwood’s sad commentary –

now a winsome glow,

as if every molecule of you

infuses this Earth you loved.

I expected otherwise – had your death been

anything I considered – that the birds and trees,

the swamps and all that still lives would mourn

as we do. The landscape would lose itself,

fade into shades of gray. The rain that all summer

refused to fall would flood the highest ground.

But now you’ve turned to glimmer. Each glance

into the world I thought I knew brings

a new configuration. You remain everywhere.

Pat Riviere-Seel

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Patience

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, imagery, nature photography, NC Poets, Pat Riviere-Seel, poetry, Southern writing on August 11, 2023| 25 Comments »

[with poems by Pat Riviere-Seel]

Letting Go

Today the trees release their leaves. The wind

a breath that calls the colors down to earth –

wild dance with crimson, gold and brown

aloft in death, unfurling flaming fields

and forest floor. If I could hurl myself

like this into each ending, long for nothing

sure or safe,

+++++ descend, a woman trusting the fall,

I’d release all claim to expectation,

breathe the air of possibility,

find beginnings everywhere.

I’d settle down to loamy earth long enough

to nourish what waits, growing still

in the summons from a savage world.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

Books are patient. Perhaps not the words within their pages, sometimes so flash-in-the-pan, sometimes arrogantly urgent, even caustic. Paragraphs may wheedle, whine, cajole, browbeat. Paper, on the other hand, ink and glue, they will wait for you as long as they must. As long as it takes. If you care for a book, it will not curl its covers like the arms across her chest of a seven-year old who scowls as you attend to something that is not her. The book is patient. It will be ready when you are, and only then.

Which means, I suppose, that I’m ready. I spy the name on its slender spine, wiggle it free while its companions try to slide out with it (Now, now, patience!). I’ve know it was in the pile waiting for me. I know I’ve opened it a time or two in some misty past. I know I will recognize some of the poems on its pages. But this is the day I, it, we have been waiting for. I sit down, open to the title page, turn once to read the contents and section headings, move on to the first poem prepared to read every page until it ends. I enter the book’s world.

Please don’t scoff “cliché” when I tell you this book has transported me. The poems ignore any strictures of time and space; on each page I land in another moment of the writer’s life and I live it with her. Perhaps a few minutes pass, perhaps an hour, but when I lay the book down again I discover I am in a different place. Doesn’t each journey create a new journeyer? I look around, I blink, I realize I know things and have felt things I never knew or felt before.

More than twenty years ago, at one of the first North Carolina Poetry Society meetings I ever attended, I discovered myself in conversation with a red-haired woman describing the poem she had just shared at open mic, and how she’d recently attended a family reunion in Lewisville, NC. “Interesting,” I said, “A few years before my grandmother died we had a big reunion of her family in Lewisville. At the little Methodist church there. My great-great-great-grandfather is buried in the churchyard.” “Why, that’s were we had our reunion, too. My great-great-grandfather was once minister and is buried there. His name was Doub.” “As in Reverend J.N.S Doub? My Mom’s great-great-grandfather?!” Thus the beginning of an enduring friendship with my third cousin once removed, Pat Riviere-Seel.

Pat’s wonderful Nothing Below But Air has been more than worth the wait. The title is perfectly apt. Pat explores every relationship, whether with family, parents, lovers, with no safety net and no climbing harness. Will she fall? Don’t we all? The most dangerous and revealing relationship she explores is with herself, the self that evolves and grows from youthful mistakes through adult rebellion toward confident maturity. She through her poems emerges finally into that honest self-awareness and humility that only come when you’re willing to leap. And for the nosy cousin, scattered among the poems is evidence of the wildest, highest leap of all, her late-in-life marriage to Ed. Happy 26th anniversary, Cousin, coming up on November 29! And thank you for this rich and personal poetry, as always enriching our friendship.

You can still order your copy of Nothing Below But Air from the Main Street Rag bookstore. It is still waiting for you. Patiently.

. . . and discover more from Pat Riviere-Seel HERE . . .

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I took today’s photographs on July 6, 2023 at the North Carolina Aquarium in Pine Knoll Shores. There are also NC Aquaria in Manteo on Roanoke Island, at Fort Fisher near Kure Beach, and on Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head. Each is different from the others and each worth a visit.

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What Emmett Saw

I outran a storm as he took aim,

his lens focused on distant clouds.

Next morning my anonymous back

appeared in black and white, front page,

local section. Gathering Storm, the caption read.

I held a backbend till my spine

almost snapped so he could photograph

my profile against the setting sun.

I mounted rooftops, shook

my rusty curls over staircase railings.

I shimmied into trees and once sat

hours under white lights, watching him

watch me. Behind the bellows

he framed a girl whose portrait

won him best in show. It hangs now

on my bedroom wall, passport

to the days with Emmett,

who embraced grassy slopes,

winter limbs, captured

the woman I was becoming.

It was the year I exploded –

my first husband, gone

before I turned twenty. Good

sense abandoned, I coiled,

a copperhead ready to sing my fangs

into kindness – showed up drunk

or stoned, canceled dates,

used every curse word I know

but banished all endearments.

Emmett endured.

I did everything he asked,

even walked the railroad trestle

at dawn in a white bikini –

stumbling, heavy with sleep,

my feet perched on a metal rail

and nothing below but air.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

First Question

After the introductions, polite talk

about what brought you here,

twenty miles from the nearest town,

someone always asks, what do you do?

not meaning what is your job-title-status,

but what sustains you,

how the rhythm of your life

keeps you alive.

+++++ Here it is enough

to garden, to run, to knit,

to wipe sot from small noses,

to brush horses in twilight, to spend

your nights on Celo Knob, to know

the names of wildflower, to let

your breath count the hours.

Pat Riviere-Seel

❦ ❦ ❦

There must be hundreds of ways to read books, but here’s my favorite for a volume of poetry: phone and computer in another room, on the couch with my feet up or better yet out on the screened porch, ceiling fan in summer, warm jacket in winter. I ignore the cover blurbs until later – this is my time to spend with these poems – then I read straight through from the table of contents to the endnotes. Maybe it takes more than one sitting. Maybe I read some pages more than once. Straight through, though, is a way to connect on a deeper level with the writer, who no doubt had all these poems spread out on the living room floor for days trying to figure out which one should come next. And did figure it out.

And each book flies its own little banner, an index card for notes. I jot page number and titles I want to return to. I copy out lines that just slay me. I discover themes or recurrent images. After the final page I go back through and read my favorites again. And then one more process before I share these poems with you, O unusually dedicated reader of this blog to have made it this far down the screen – I type the poems out myself. Interesting how re-typing a poem can reveal the bones beneath its skin, make its whispers audible.

Thank you for sharing this space and for enlarging the joy that poetry creates

— Bill
.

. .

❦ ❦ ❦

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Beneath the Surface, Waiting – Pat Riviere-Seel

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, family, imagery, Main Street Rag Publishing, nature photography, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, Pat Riviere-Seel, Southern writing, When There Were Horses on December 17, 2021| 9 Comments »

[with 3 poems from When There Were Horses]

Once upon a time there was a little boy . . . . a frisson of anticipation: the four-year old’s attention is now riveted on Pappy. What mischief will the boy in the story create, what adventure awaits, what danger?

When my grandson used to ask me to tell him a story it was a gift to both of us. Often the stories sprouted spontaneously from our pretending and play, their main characters usually some of his favorite companions like Mousey and Blue Rat. What joy and entertainment when you engage with the characters in a narrative! Even more so if you identify with the characters – their plight, their seeking, their discoveries strike a resonant chord in your own heart. You live a little richer and fuller through them.

But what if you are them?! What if you are the little boy in the story unfolding? What if a door opens and you enter the story and it becomes an extension of your own? The gift the teller gives you in that moment can’t be measured.

So many of the poems in Pat Riviere-Seel’s new book, When There Were Horses, open that door for me. I enter the lines. Not only do I engage, not only identify, but I become a part of the narrative. The resonance moves me to reflect on my own arc, my own plight and seeking. How does that happen?

How does poetry do that stuff? Mmmm, mystery and magic. Art and invitation. I admit I don’t actually know the details or specifics of many of Pat’s narratives but even so I have come to feel a part of them. When I get past asking, “What does she mean by that?” and just enter the flow of how she is creating meaning, then her poems crack open new earth. There, beneath the mud of daily routine, behind the obfuscation of some constant ringing little voice in my head, something waits. Waiting to sprout and bloom. Waiting to sing a new song. Waiting and wanting to peel back all that separates us from each other, and from our inner self. Something is beneath the surface, waiting to break our heart, and to heal it.

. . . . . . .

From the Almanac of Broken Things

I choose this earth that breaks
my heart again and again,

the woods for the way trees
bend, fall, and return to dirt.

I choose the sand dollar, the nautilus
that in brokenness finds new creation.

I choose the favorite doll that no longer cries,
loved into silence, into rags.

I choose the memory of a stranger’s touch
that lifted my face above water. Because

I did not drown, I choose morning,
the gauzy-gray dawn that returns.

I choose the once-wild Palomino
whose beauty can never be tamed.

I choose light from long dead stars
that illuminates without heat.

I choose March with its promise of spring,
the warm days that tease, the blizzard

that insulates and warms the bulbs, the seeds,
all that lies beneath the surface, waiting.

Pat Riviere-Seel
inspired by Linda Pastan’s poem The Almanac of Last Things

. . . . . . .

What the Moon Knows

She knows shadow, how to
slip behind clouds. She’s perfected
the art of disappearing. She knows
how to empty herself into the sky,
whisper light into darkness.
She knows the power of silence,
how to keep secrets, even as men
leave footprints in the dust, try to claim her.
Waxing and waning, she summons
the tides. Whole and holy symbol,
she remains perfect truth, tranquility.
Friend and muse, she knows the hearts
of lovers and lunatics. She knows
she is not the only one that fills the sky,
but the sky is her only home.

Pat Riviere-Seel

. . . . . . .

Enough

Ahead, I see her watching me, pity
or compassion, hard to tell
from this distance. I want to ask her,
my future self, what she knows
and when she knew it. I want to know
whose laughter fills her hours? Does she
still dance? Still run? What does she know
of grace? These days I know so little.

But she’s still faithful, the self I look back
to see at dawn, a quarter century ago,
running out Colbert Creek road between
woods and murmur of the South Toe River, two-lane
Highway 80 South, past Mount Mitchell Golf Course,
down macadam that turns into gravel, clatter across
the low water bridge, out Rock Creek Road,
before she turns toward her dusty driveway,
past grape vines, the garden where the black cat
waits to walk her home. She’s the one who
declared, I am enough. She’s kept her promise.
But now, knowledge brings scraps
falling from bone that offers proof
something happened here in this lost country –
three deaths, one new love.

Pat Riviere-Seel
all selections from When There Were Horses, © 2021 Pat Riviere-Seel, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC

. . . . . . .

FULL DISCLOSURE: Pat Riviere-Seel is my cousin. Third cousin one generation removed is how I think we figured it. Pat and I first met twenty years ago at a North Carolina Poetry Society meeting at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines. During a break we were sharing casually about what we’d been doing lately and she mentioned her recent family reunion in Lewisville, NC.

“We met at an old Methodist Church in Lewisville where my Great-Great-Grandfather is buried.”

“No way, we had a family reunion in Lewisville a few years ago and we met at a church, might be the same one, where my Great-Great-Great-Grandfather is buried. His name was J.N.S. Daub.’

“Uh, hmm, mine is named Daub, too. Reverend Daub.”

“I’ve got a photo of the headstone at home. I’ll send you a copy.”

Sure enough, one and the same Daub. That was my maternal Great-Grandmother’s maiden name. Three Daub sisters married three McBride brothers. So Pat and my Mom are third cousins (although separated in age by more than a generation).

All those years, something beneath the surface, waiting.

– – – B

. . . . . . .