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A Stone Ready to Roll

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2024| 8 Comments »

 . 
[with poems from Pinesong 2024]
 . 
Grown
 . 
– and you wonder why on good days, she is a fledgling
++++ fallen from its nest. Wrists encircled
++++ ++++ in bird bones, origami limbs
++++ awash in green. To be a body
 . 
in this world is to take comfort
++++ in arrow-straight lines. This is why girls these days
++++ ++++ exist horizontally, among
++++ tree roots thick with stories.
 . 
She tells you she would like to disappear
++++ into the silver curve of the sun. You see it
++++ ++++ in the way she sucks on her fingertips, the way
++++ the sunglow stains her eyes gold. You imagine
 . 
she would fade this way – downy wings
++++ tucked close. Watercolor irises
++++ ++++ soaking into the canvas of the sky,
++++ the smoothest of stones beneath her tongue.
 . 
In the meantime, she means to craft a crown
++++ inlaid with seeds. Gathers cracked corn,
++++ ++++ yellowing wheat. Every crippled thing
++++ she has ever loved.
 . 
You wonder if she means to break
++++ the way the sky does. Float feather
++++ ++++ into her hair like cloud cover, and let
++++ the leaves sliver her apart.
 . 
Luna Hou
Pinesong 2024 – Undergraduate Awards, Second Place
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Why does a person write?
 . 
The mind is a puppy intent on chewing everything to tatters. The mind is a genie in a bottle, entrapped, enclosed, desperate for some way out – the granting of wishes being simply its impulse of gratitude. The mind is a ship lost on a dark sea but remembering dawn and yearning to rediscover the eastern horizon. The mind is altogether solitary and horrifyingly isolated and grasping for any connection, any at all!
 . 
Or perhaps the mind is a whirling planetoid whose gravity and momentum are approbation and a relentless hunt for its 15 minutes of fame. No, no, that’s the answer to a different question – Why does a person share what they have written? And of a multiplicity of answers perhaps the most cynical. How about this alternative: Joy shared is joy squared (or cubed). One mind running is a hamster in a wheel, but two minds in tandem create the traction that slowly, surely sets the earth spinning.
 . 
The mind is a stone on top of a hill. Potential energy . . . plus energy of activation. The mind picks up a pen, but not until its words reach out to another mind does it begin to roll.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Miss you. Would like to pitch a tent with you.
++++ After Gabrielle Calvocoressi
 . 
Do not care if you have money for the campsite.
Would love to pick this one up, pick up fire-
wood, while I’m at it. Set your lawn chair close
to mine. Miss you. Would like to stir a pot
of mac & cheese on the Coleman stove
like you used to when we all got so tired
of the city. Sit around the picnic table,
orange sauce oozing through white paper plates.
Would love to walk up Foscoe Creek with you,
all the way to the dam. Damn, I miss you.
Wish you would unzip your guilt body.
Would love to help yo burn it. Imagine
how light you could feel. How free your arms.
We could fling the frisbee until dark. Pop open
Pepsis, pop some corn. Would like to ask you
to leave that book on the pew. Miss you. Wish you
believed what you say – that you are truly forgiven.
Just for today, let’s turn of the tv, forget who
is President, not argue about the earth’s shape.
The breeze off the river feels holy. I’d love you
to feel it. Love to show you there’s nothing to forgive.
 . 
Kathie Collins
Pinesong 2024 – Carol Bessent Hayman Poetry of Love Award, First Place
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Revelry
 . 
As a squirrel in the top of the highest hickory
is silently teasing a glorious strobe show
of dawn’s golden light to tickle its way down
through the leaves to the ground and a yellow-billed
cuckoo somewhere past the pasture is cooing
a so soothing, solo reverie, a fawn is navigating
so noisily through these woods, I’m certain there must be
an exasperated doe somewhere very close, having serious
doubts about motherhood . . . .
 . 
Caren Stuart
Pinesong 2024 – Katherine Kennedy McIntyre Light Verse Award, Fist Place
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Thank you, all you writers, who share what you have written! Pinesong 2024 is the annual anthology of the North Carolina Poetry Society. The book is the collected poems by winners of the Society’s contests, eleven contests for adults, four youth, one for college undergrads. Each May, winners are invited to read their poems at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines, NC. This has become a much anticipated celebration, showcasing the breadth of submissions and talent of the writers involved, as exhibited by today’s sampling of selections.
 . 
Contest judges are prominent poets from around the country; the Poet Laureate category and youth and undergrad contests are limited to North Carolina residents, but all other contests are open and unrestricted. The next NC Poetry Society contest entry period opens November 15, 2024.
 . 
NC Poetry Society: since 1932 supporting, promoting, and celebrating poetry. More information about membership and contests is available HERE
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Welcome to Lagos, Nigeria
 . 
I walked though the jet bridge,
studier in New York’s terminal,
off my third flight in 36 hours.
The air in the airport was rich.
I was greeted by aunties, uncles,
cousins, salesmen with bracelets.
 . 
I sat in the patchy black leather seat
of my grandmother’s ‘93 4Runner
sounding like the last mile in Africa.
The stucco house was surrounded
by a 12-foot-high barbed-wire gate.
So many cousins I had never seen
 . 
all playing Ludo, the board game
like Monopoly. Aunties never seen
plucking my cheeks, telling me stories
about myself I had never heard.
All while my mother’s eldest brother
was being murdered by the terrorist
 . 
group Boko Haram while trying
to find a Christmas tree for us.
This December marks the 8th
anniversary of my absence
from Lagos, Nigeria. Little
brother, I still see you running
with me though the Christmas
tree lot and hiding in Pineville.
 . 
Kenny Ogbata
Pinesong 2024 – Sherry Pruitt Award (grades 10-12), Second Place
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Luna Hou is a rising senior at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC.
 . 
Kathie Collins lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a mythologist and Jungian, and co-founder & creative director of Charlotte Lit.
 . 
Caren Stuart lives in wild Chatham County, North Carolina. Her many creative endeavors are born of and bloom with joy.
 . 
Kenny Ogbata is a rising senior at Charlotte Latin School, Charlotte NC.
 . 
Chris Abbate lives in North Carolina. His latest collection is Words for Flying, FutureCycle Press (2022).
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Setting You Free
++++ for Rosemary
 . 
Think of your arm
as a wing,
the shoulder a hinge
that made you fly.
When it tore, you felt
as if the surgeon had turned his anger
into it, as if he had pressed
the weight of himself
into the hurt, two screws
twisted into humerus.
 . 
During recovery, you tripped
over a throw rug
to answer an impatient doorbell,
an accident, but a new crack
to let some light in,
for another surgeon
to undo the tightness,
unscrew the anger and
make the hinge supple,
give the wing motion.
 . 
Imagine falling to rise,
ascending again
to survey the dark
hem of the Maine Coastline,
its green blanket
of pines nestled against
the chin of your house.
Imagine becoming a bird again,
as you once were,
as you always have been.
 . 
Chris Abbate
Pinesong 2024 – Jean Williams Poetry of Disability, Disease, and Healing, Honorable Mention
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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Voice

Posted in Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2024| 6 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Michael Gaspeny]
 . 
Dr. Petway is Retiring, 1962
 . 
My husband’s such a ball of pep,
if I shot him, he’d pluck out the bullet, eat it,
slap Old Spice on the hole in his chin,
leave for work whistling.
 . 
My boys will follow their fishing rods
to the rock-and-roll backseats of panting cars
and into sleepwalking marriage.
Fritz the dachshund lies in his basket licking
his parts. Hear his slurping all over the house.
If only I’d had one daughter.
 . 
How do you tell love from guilt?
How real is your love when you can’t trust yourself?
Lie around so much, I should be upholstered.
My life’s a song: “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette.”
 . 
What do you do when you can’t buy a dream?
If I drift in my nighty through Fantasy Park,
Cary Grant hides in the bushes.
When I close my eyes, the curtains rise,
but the film splits. I wait in the dark, clutching
my ticket. What good is it?
 . 
Dr. Petway listens. He doesn’t tell me
to count my blessings, polish the silverware.
He says my pain is justified, arising from the good inside.
He says my chance to heal will come.
He has to pass me on. Dr. Petway will soon be gone.
 . 
Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I see you watching me. In fact, there’s never a moment I don’t notice you. Paying attention is not a pastime – it’s staying alive.
 . 
Not that I can imagine what you’re thinking, standing there at your discrete distance. I couldn’t even try, you and I are so unlike. I know what I’m thinking, though. I’m just here making sure. Yeah, making sure.
 . 
But what do you say let’s try it, just this once, both of us try to imagine. You hear my chatter, follow my swift flitting. Do I seem frantic to you, pressured? Maybe you imagine me exhausting myself with motion and anxiety. It’s not really in my vocabulary, but don’t you recognize projection when you see it?
 . 
This is who I am. This is why I am. Defending my territory. Building and growing. And now these three youngsters. If yours were crying out to you like mine do, wouldn’t you be back and forth every three minutes making sure they have everything they need? And after dusk, when they finally nod off, maybe you’d lean back and say to no one in particular, “I am exhausted,” but I’m thinking you’d be saying that with a little grin on your face and more than a little joy in your heart.
 . 
If you said it in any other way, you wouldn’t make much of a wren.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Taking After Mom
 . 
Each day Tommy whips a rubber baseball against the house
from a homemade mound. He’s throwing his heart out.
Whump. . . Whump. . . Whump – ball against brick for hours.
High school senior, no team wants him. If he could hang
that wind-up on a hook in the garage, I’d pitch it in the trash.
“Mom, where’s my motion?” he’d ask.
“Haven’t seen it, son.”
 . 
In English class, the book he chose to analyze was
The House of the Dead. It must have sounded familiar.
I read it behind his back. I couldn’t put it down.
I got hooked on Dostoevsky novels
from Crime and Punishment, to The Devils.
In Tommy’s book, I underlined the passage
where the author says useful work ennobles
a prisoner, but if you give that convict two glasses,
one full of water, the other empty, and force him
to pour back and forth all day, he’ll lose his mind.
I wish Dostoevsky could counsel my son
about pitching to no one.
 . 
Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Addie Zampesi recounts her life. Confesses and raves. Gripes and pines. Hides then finds the truth inside herself, misses then discovers what’s truly inside her husband and sons. Forty years she tells it, 1933 to 1973, opens it all to us in lines on the page, even grants us a brief glance back as her family casts her ashes into the bay. Oh my goodness, Addie, how we have come to know you!
 . 
Oh my goodness, Addie, how Michael has spoken your voice! What do you do when you can’t buy a dream? The Tyranny of Questions – such an apt title. Every poem asks, “What does it all mean? What am I to make of this? Why am I here?” And is there an answer to be had? None, not a one, except in discovering forty years and forty pages of how to ask the question.
 . 
Outside the book I ask, “How has he done it?” How has Michael Gaspeny discovered, or created, Addie’s voice and kept it sure and true through all these poems? It reassured me a little to have him tell me it took him over five years to write these, and it reassured me more to learn that Addie shadows the quietly desperate life of his mother. I told him that if I had found out he created this persona de novo, as pure imagination, I was going to burn all my old drafts and scribblings and bow at his feet, my demigod.
 . 
But I defy anyone to ask this: How can a man be permitted to write in the voice of a woman? It is the writer’s ultimate gift, to step outside themselves. It is the ultimate gift to the reader, to open us to experiences outside ourselves. Thank you, Michael Gaspeny.
 . 
Maybe I won’t thank him, though, for one thing. As I corresponded with Michael about discovering and acquiring voices that transcend our own, I joked about writing in the voice of the asparagus I had just cut for brunch. Michael assured me he had no doubt I would be able to do so. Now I can’t pick up the shears without hearing a small green voice saying, “Oh shit, not again!”
 . 
❦
 . 
Purchase The Tyranny of Questions and learn more about Unicorn Press HERE
 . 
Michael Gaspeny has also authored the chapbooks Vocation and Re-Write Men. He has won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the O. Henry Festival Short Story Competition. He taught journalism and English for almost forty years at High Point University and Bennett College
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I Had to Do Something
 . 
With Tommy off to college near Richmond,
Ben wheedled his father into sending him
to private school in Charlottesville
(we’ll see what comes of that experiment).
My smoke veiled the rooms. Always a Camel in hand,
another winking wherever I left my drink.
 . 
Dear Reader, come one, come all. Meet the model
for the mystery woman etched in the pyramid
on the Camel pack. Roy grumbled, “You’ll burn us out!”
I bit back:”I’ll stop when you take that foul Pall Mall
out of your mouth.” He went cold turkey, begged
me to quit, left cancer pamphlets under my whiskey.
 . 
My breath grew halt. I drank and dozed
on the sofa curled around silver-muzzled Fritz,
cherishing his whimpers. After years of crotch-licking
and finger-nipping, he was baby sweet,
with breath Queen Elizabeth would crawl for.
 . 
At Brentaldo’s, I tore in a First Family of Virginia harpy
hissing because a Negro customer tried on a scarf.
That Scarlet O’Hara fright stabbed me with her eyes,
said, “At least they’re not in the changing rooms yet.
You must be a carpetbagger fortunate to kiss
the earth in God’s country of Virginia.”
I shoved her. She swung her purse.
The manager wedged between us.
 . 
On easter, I saw her at First Colony, where self-esteem
was thicker than perfume. I thought, “If Jesus came,
they’d offer Him Communion. What have I belonged to?”
Dr. Schwepson gave me new tranqs nd the Serenity Prayer.
I raved, “I will no longer accept the things I cannot change.
This prayer is Sleepy Time tea justifying lying down
when you ought to stand up, even if I haven’t done it yet!”
 . 
Michael Gaspeny
from The Tyranny of Questions, Unicorn Press, Greensboro NC, © 2020
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-06-11a
 . 

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Lean In

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on May 31, 2024| 12 Comments »

 . 
[with 4 poems by Lou Lipsitz]
 . 
Blackberry Authority
 . 
When I first came out to the country
+++ I knew nothing. I watched
as people planted, harvested, picked
+++ the berries, explained
the weather, tended the ducks and horses.
 . 
When I first came out to the country
+++ my mind emptied and I
liked it that way. My mind was like a sky
+++ without clouds, a summer sky
with several birds flapping across a field
+++ on the eastern horizon.
 . 
I like the slowness of things, the empty
+++ town, the lake stillness,
the man I met who seemed contented, who
+++ sat and talked in the dusk
about why he had chosen this long ago.
 . 
I did better dreaming then, the colors
+++ were clear. I found something
important in myself: capacity for renewal.
+++ And at night, the sky so intense.
Clear incredible stars! Almost another earth.
 . 
But now I see there are judgements here.
+++ This way of planting or that.
The arguments about fertilizers and organics:
+++ problems of time, figuring how
to allocate what we have. So many matters
+++ to fasten on and dissect.
 . 
That’s the way it is with revelations.
+++ If you live it out, your start
thinking, examining. The mind cries out
+++ for materials to play with.
Right now, in fact, I’m excited about
+++ several new vines and waiting
for the blackberry authorities to arrive.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
This green chasm, engulfing trees and vines – this is four lane 421 west of Winston-Salem, not the Appalachian Trail. Last summer was all orange barrels, lane closures, men in trucks extending long booms with wicked whirling steel teeth. Dragon-necked cretaceous devourers, no gentle arborist in sight, slashing open the Yadkin Valley bar sinister for twenty miles.
 . 
Then winter, splintered, broken and bare. Grey horizontal walls sixty feet high along the roadway. Conquered, blasted, subdued.
 . 
Until spring. Sunlight, warming earth, the gathering retaliation of cambium and rising sap. This May impenetrable green fills every chink, lines the cowering freeway, and reaches into the light. Untouched leafy crowns look down on us as we speed past. The canopy crowds the sky. Every shade of jade, kelly, forest fills our periphery through the windshield . If our machines and our hubris withdrew for a year or two, would Kingdom Plantae march in and obliterate all traces of our presence?
 . 
I feel the King’s green pressure leaning in.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Evening
 . 
The poet’s test
is to write a poem
called “evening”
beginning in the small street
near the bay
where they are selling clams.
 . 
There must be a woman
he is pursuing
in his own distracted way
– someone he has sought
for years
and can almost catch.
 . 
There must be a fire
somewhere
in the darkening sun for example
or in a room
where logs are flaming
and the poet
must hold back and wait
until he knows
exactly what not to say.
 . 
Then, when he opens his lips,
the moon will
come out of his mouth.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
In the book store, across the room, before the poetry reading begins, I glimpse a man I haven’t seen in twenty years. It was at another poetry meeting. We spoke for just a few minutes and I bought his book. I know exactly where that book is today, in one of the piles on my desk, waiting for me to open it and let it speak to me again. When I get home I will.
 . 
A poem may capture a moment or span a lifetime. It may tell a story or simply evoke a gut response. Perhaps the poem is historical, explicitly tethered to a date and place. Or perhaps, as Lou Lipsitz writes in Evening, the poet / must hold back and wait / until he knows / exactly what not to say.
 . 
Read Walt Whitman, writing 150 years ago – the distance in time and space is no real impediment to you lying with him in a field of grass. The lines weave into you and wrap you into their reality, becoming your reality, remaining theirs. But now read poems written 30 years ago by a man pictured in his 40’s on the book jacket whom you’ve just seen in the flesh in his 70’s. Reality is more complicated. The longing and conflict in those lines, do they still reside in that person who wrote them? Is it even fair to ask? Does it matter at all in the moment of reading, in the reflection afterwards?
 . 
Lou Lipsitz’s Seeking the Hook is deeply personal, painful and contemplative, self-accusatory and redeeming. Reading the poems then and reading the poems now jars me to ask how I myself have changed in those twenty or thirty years. I share those accusations; I seek the same redemption. The reality I discover in these poems touches me in new ways, perhaps more confusing but perhaps also more familiar. Personal. I want to tell Lou this, but when the reading has concluded I turn and he is gone.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Song of the Divorced Father
 . 
“. . . I realized that it’s inevitable; wounds are part
of what parent give their children.”
++++++++++++++ Michael Meade
 . 
There was a woman poet from Chile who
wrote “sleep close to me” to her small son.
Reading that, I think of you, children, no
so long and substantial, no beyond
my picking up and carrying to bed, now
beyond the reach almost of my arms and my soul.
 . 
I remember the night silence and my father-ear
listening for your breathing; the cries and
choking sound that pulled me from sleep.
I remember the early mornings of sentimental
thoughts as I watched your faces utterly
asleep, and then strange dreams you told
of wolves and weddings and curious caves
full of treasure.
 . 
Now I want you to sleep near me, to be
in the house with me, so we can sing together
sometimes, so I can relearn your new voices.
So we can carry the wounds together,
pulling them from the sea, an old boat
we used to fish in –
+++ turn it upsidedown and let the flaking
+++ paint dry in the sun – then when night comes
+++ we can howl and weep – you can hammer me
+++ with you small fists of long ago and we can
+++ hack the boat apart and burn it;
+++ it will burn all night, the stars wheeling above us
+++ as we lie there, separate, exhausted.
 . 
Then in the morning, the boat will be intact,
awaiting us, the blue paint fresh. I will say:
“let’s get some fish in the marshes.” And you
will steer, knowing the way all over again.
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
A Task
 . 
+++ — reply to Auden & the intellectuals
 . 
Potatoes. I will hunt potatoes
in the fashion of my grandmother
who fed us all.
 . 
Potatoes. Like the tough hearts of young men.
The core of dark joy in sexual love.
The world that trembles and changes.
 . 
In the fashion of my grandmother
I will abandon all exotic things
 . 
and hunt a language
of odd, true shapes the were nurtured in the old earth
 . 
Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook: New and Selected Poems, Signal Books, Chapel Hill NC; © 1997
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Biography and other works by Lou Lipsitz HERE
 . 
Selected poems by Lou Lipsitz in THE SUN
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
 . 

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