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Traces

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2011| 2 Comments »

Linda’s sister Jodi is a National Park Service ranger in the New River Gorge.  In addition to some of her jobs like cultural and historical interpretation, wildflower walks, and storytelling, she’s also a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School: she teaches people visiting the backcountry to Leave No Trace.

Is it really possible to leave no trace of your passing?  Whether it’s an afternoon in the Greensboro Arboretum or ten days on the AT, can you really return from a place with no evidence you were ever there?  In years past the NPS and other outdoor organizations had less ambitious slogans:  Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires; Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute; Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Footprints; Pack It In, Pack It Out.  But no trace at all?!  Even if all six billion of us recycled, composted, and travelled everywhere we went via shank’s mare, just the act of breathing in and out sends billows of carbon dioxide like a blanket into the atmosphere.  Leave No Trace — are you kidding me?

I wrote this poem, little mouse (trace), with my son and daughter in mind.  At different times one or the other of them has taken extended wilderness treks with me, and we’ve struggled to practice the best stewardship over wild places that we can.  (Margaret’s famous quotation upon reaching a road crossing with a refuse bin and over a pound of garbage in her pack:  “Trash cans rock my world!”)  But the world I want to leave them is not one with a few nice paths through the woods free of candy wrappers.  It’s not just the expectation that a few hikers will know how to erase the marks of their stay when they break camp.  It’s more like some crazy hope that all of us, every one, will retain an acute awareness of our traces right in the very places where we live.  That we’ll regret the unavoidable scars we leave on the earth.  That we’ll celebrate together when we can heal one.

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little mouse
(trace)

I want to leave the earth and climb
the snowbank cumulus, kick
my boots into the billow, lean
against my sassafras stick and rise.
Rain licks the slickrock clean

of my prints, greenbriar weaves
wild drapery up the wall, hickory sprouts
through the sidewalk.  I want to leave
no trace of my passing, no more trail
than the cursive of a slender tail

in dew.  Morning sun drinks that cup
and learns a word I never spoke,
someone’s new word for love.  I
want to be no more I but we – creature
loam bud feather; let roots translate

the phosphorus of my dust to fruit.
If you look for me a wren calls.
If you listen the poplar turns to honey
in the sky.  Drink deep this cup.  I want
to leave the earth to you.

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[from little mouse, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2011]

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Home in What We Hope to Find

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on May 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ve made a whole lot of bird lists over the past twenty years. (Made a BIG one yesterday – see the post in a couple of days.)  I’ve got lists for my yard, my neighborhood, for Elkin and Surry County, for Pine Knoll Shores, for NC and a bunch of other states, and then of course the master list, the “life” list.  I’ve even gone on a couple of organized trips where a guide would point to the bird and tell you what it was — then you add it to another list.  And check it off in your database when you get home.

But among all those lists, among the thousands of data points, for some reason there are some individual birds I never forget.  My first Northern Parula – right here in my own backyard, but I waited almost an hour for it to show itself at the tip of the big white oak.  The Black-Throated Blue Warbler Mary Ellen and I spotted near Muskrat Creek Shelter on the AT, our last evening together on the trail.  The Common Yellowthroat Nancy and I stalked through briars so she could see her first one.  On and on.  I’m thankful for each creature’s tiny jewelled body.  I’m thankful they decided not to conceal themselves forever.

The birds I added to my list during organized trips are just not as memorable as the others (well, maybe the Harlequin Duck bobbing in the surf at the pier in Rodanthe . . .).  Am I saying that we treasure most those things we have to work for?  Good Puritan ethic! But that’s not exactly it; I guess I would rather say we treasure those things we discover for ourselves.  The branches are full of warblers – will I raise my eyes and look?

This is the closing section of my poem Leave and Come Home.  My journey as father is about to enter unmapped territory – the mountains and coves of grandfather.  Warblers are returning from their wintering grounds to make a new home.  How have they found their way?  How will Josh and I find ours?  Some vast unseen magnetism compels us.  Perhaps home has always been, although unnamed and so often unseen, that inner will to discover.  Maybe home is always that very thing we hope to find.


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Leave and Come Home
Backyard, Elkin, North Carolina

Which one is home: what I know and leave behind
or what I have yet to reach?
May 1st storms all day and night but this bright morning
frees the migrants from their cover – tree limbs fill
with warblers.  In an hour they’ll resume their passage north,
but for now they’re willing to reveal themselves
if we have the will to notice.

In a few days Josh will become a father. I watch
the corner of his mouth for a hint of one laconic smile . . .
there it is!  He follows a trail of a hundred steps to assemble
my grandson’s crib. Outside the back window
Cardinals jostle at the feeder and

among the poplar blossoms warblers ruffle droplets
from their wings, show off their woodland jewelry,
glean aphids from beech twigs.  In the spotlight
Black-Sided Blue preens in formal dress, then flies.
And does he dream of the feast of insects
at his Costa Rican winter grounds or of the nest
he’ll build at Clingman’s Dome?  Or is it simply
some vast unseen magnetism, cycle of sun and
circling stars that speak to him to reveal
his home?  Point to it, Mom.  Or leave
me to discover it myself – home may yet abide
in what we hope to find.

Tomorrow I will lean into that crib compelled
by stars and magnetism, leave for later the unnameable
complexity of color, shape, song, that unspoken
trail that twists between son and father:
into that soft pink ear, I’ll whisper Redbird.

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[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society.  In four sections, it reflects some fifty years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family.  I posted section 1 on 5/8, section 2 on 5/15, and 3 on 5/22.  This is the fourth and final section.]

 

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Voices of the Lost

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on May 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A couple of years ago my friend Mike and I went backpacking in the Slickrock Wilderness,  near Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  On day one we reached our camp site in mid-afternoon, about half-way up the mountain along Little Santeetlah Creek.  With tent pitched and bear bags hung, I lay down in a patch of sun to listen to the chatter and riffle of cold crystal over moss-draped boulders, laughter over smoothworn gravel.

As I dozed, water voices sang to me.  Urgent conversations, reminding, cajoling, the words critical but somehow never clear.  I half-dreamed of the people that had walked these hills.  Native hunters stalking deer where the clamor masks the sound of their approach.  Homesteaders sledging river stones to turn to cornerstones beneath chestnut timbers.  Foresters marking the next stand they’ll cut, somehow never reaching the old growth poplar and hemlock at Joyce Kilmer.

So many voices lost in the creek’s murmurings, yet also brought to life in that mutter. Aren’t we as poets the keepers of lost voices?  We capture in a phrase a moment that would have been forgotten, an image that would fade.  If we can speak for those who have no words they will “bless us with their bones.”

This poem by Margaret Boothe Baddour, For the Lost Poets, speaks to all who would be keepers of lost voices.  Seeking a mountaintop, discovering a new high place, she revivifies those poets whose voices might have been overcome by the clamorous falling water of years.  Before we can say, “We are lost,” we find ourselves in a new place with new breath.  Be still, listen for meaning within the whisper, the murmur, the water, the earth.  Someone wants to speak to you.

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Star Chickweed

For the Lost Poets
           —            Wildacres, 2008

For every day they die among us,
those who knew it was never enough
but hoped to improve a little by living.
             –   W.H.Auden, “In Memory of Freud”

I.  They Whisper to Us
On this mountain top – so high not even birds
fly here and only small, complcated insects
amid the ox-eye daisies and wild yarrow
worry us with their rush-roar-whir –
we brieve for those poets whose rustling voices
the quiet, the strong, even the raucous ones
are lost.  No, not lost.  Only hushed.
They whisper from just over the next hill.

II.  We Are Lost
We lose our way, looking for Roan Mountain
where, folks say, the pale pink laurel grows.
At the crossroads, an old man stand
like a cigar store Indian.  His white mustache
and brogans, his worn overall speak hillbilly
but before we can say, “We are lost, he smiles
gap-toothed and points like a sign: “Turn left,”
he says.  “Three mile uphill to Roan Mountain.”

III.  They Leave Their Words
At the Continental Divide, we glimpse horses
but the cows up here, the cows so black and sleek
where sun shafts the greensward, the water so pure
at the place where it runs downhill to the east
where bugs whir in the clover!  A white moth
brushes our arms.  Like moths, those lost poets
touch, leave their words hanging, alive in the air.

IV.  We Breathe for Them
Flash of fire – a mountain man, wave of water –
an ocean lover, the stillness of stone,
the roar of wind, all those poet friends
whose wise, strong words provoked this world
have now become the earth and air.  They bless us
with their bones.  Now we must breathe for those
who, when they breathed their last, exhaled in verse.

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from Scheherazade and other poems by Margaret Boothe Baddour, Saint Andrews College Press, 2009.

Margaret teaches Humanities, Creative Writing, and Drama at wayne Community College in Goldsboro, NC, where she holds the Bell Distinguished Chair in Teaching.  Among her many awards and honors is the NC Poet Laureate Prize of the NC Poetry Society.

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