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Time’s Line

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, By Stone and Needle, Catherine Carter, Ecopoetry, family, L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award, LSU Press, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing on October 10, 2025| 3 Comments »

[with 2 poems by Catherine Carter]

Earth says

I am your mother as the horse

is mother to the louse, endlessly

intricate interlocking systems

which the blissfully sucking louse

cannot imagine and never must,

which it sums up

in some louse-sign for God

a quiver of hairs of the thorax,

a shimmer of inarticulate

gratitude for satiation and for

preservation of self, self, self.

I am sick of it, mother

with eight billion toddlers

not counting my beautiful beetles,

a horse plagued with lice, and yet.

I am your mother as you are mother

to the mosquito which hovers

over your arm as you write,

mote of thirsty gold quivering

with desperation to the boom

of great rivers in blue tunnels

and pipes just below the soft leather

scrim of skin, endless life

you’ll never miss and won’t let her have,

enough for a thousand generations.

If she tries to drink you will want

to swat her flat, and she must try,

for her unborn young, for her life. And maybe

eventually, weary of swatting,

worn down by importunity,

unwilling compassion, fear

of the insect apocalypse blossoming

all around you like the mushroom

cloud, you will incline your head. Fall

still. Let her drink her fill

and float away, a dandelion spore

on the summer air, in the hot flash

of May morning light.

Catherine W. Carter

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Imagine a straight line. It’s Geometry’s simplest one-dimensional structure. It’s the shortest distance from here to there. It’s a diagram of my life on earth. Maybe my life seems bumpy and ridden with twists but no, it starts at my beginning, forges straight through, and ends at my ending. My timeline. Beyond that it becomes someone else’s line, “me” in their memories.

It’s no accident that we all use the word timeline. (Instead of timepolygon or timecube?) Time’s line, even though it wields only one dimension, is all the vessel I have to contain my life. In fact, there is one single point on that line that holds the entirety of my awareness. I’ll label that point now. Every part of the line to the left is the extent of what has already been now and is now no more. Label it past. Everything to the right consists of nows yet to come. As I write this, several nows have just slipped by me.

How many? How many nows have I filled up (wasted?) with staring across the room wondering what to write next? Do next? Think next? Be? I shudder to even attempt an answer to that, because in exactly the same way Geometry tells us that the line is continuous, no gaps, an infinity between each point, time is also a continuum. No missing pieces. No quanta. I could fit an infinity of nows between any two nows I choose.

That adds up to a helluva lot of timeline spent worrying about my son. An infinity imagining the conversations we could have had that would have set us right, the conversations we could have tomorrow that would correct our course, revising those conversations, projecting out to the right the results of our conversations or absences thereof. Not to mention replaying out to the left the segments of line I’ll label regret.

Until now. I return home late and my son is waiting up. He tells me he’s come to a turning point. We hug. How many nows does that fill? How many is infinity? Hey Time, just for a moment, please stop now.

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When you know a witch’s true name

she has to do what you ask. If she tries

to refuse, her name lets you tighten the wire

on marrow-fears she’s spent forever

trying to hide, secret shames which sicken

her so she’d almost rather strangle than share:

the reason she wraps herself in that caul

of hexes, chainsaws, shielding spells.

This makes witches cautious.

Except something in them, in us

all, wants to hear someone say

our names with recognition, no matter

what comes after. Curled round

our glint of treasure, our shimmer

of power, we’re gongs hung

to tremble to our one true name

or one true question, the one we’ve awaited

forever, whose answer is our whole lives,

the one almost no one is interested

enough to ask. It’s why I’d come

if you summoned me up, despite.

If you knew the right question,

I would tell you anything.

Catherine W. Carter

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I’m just / what comes next when everything touches everything.

Is By Stone and Needle a book of charms and spells? Are its lines sigils and hexes that, in the hands of the seeker, reveal arcane wisdom? Is it the words of Myth and Magic, Nature and Earth that we have feared to hear and at the same time longed for?

Catherine Carter’s language is afraid of nothing. It breaks down every door. It wrenches meaning from syllables that never before dared to be said so close together. Earth, though I tremble to admit it, I guess I’ve suspected you may well be tempted to swat us like a mosquito (although I’ve always known you love your beetles). And Love, I do believe you are out there hoping to strike the gong of our true names. I am still traveling the journey of these pages. By stone and needle I trust I will find my way. And at the end find myself.

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Catherine Carter’s By Stone and Needle is available from LSU PRESS.

These poems are dense, delicious, scary, enlightening. I will feature two more poems from the collection at next weeks posting (October 17, 2025).

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The concepts of the line as unbroken continuum, the inseparable connection we make between that line and the set of all real numbers it compasses, and our human perception of time as an unbroken line are developed in a small book my wife Linda studied in college fifty years ago and which we discovered cleaning out bookcases this month:

One cover blurb states, “This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands.” Albert Einstein

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Poetry at Cary Arts Center

Posted in Imagery, tagged Bill Griffin, Cary Arts Center, imagery, Mark Cox, Michael Hettich, Narya Rose Deckard, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, North Carolina Poetry Society, poetry, Southern writing on September 26, 2025| 7 Comments »

NCPS Program VP Chad Knuth

NC Poetry Society at the Cary Arts Center

[poetry by award winners Mark Cox, Michael Hettich, and more]

All Right

The boy doesn’t know what to do. He’s only twelve. And he’s never seen adults weep, not like this at least, so distraught, disconsolate. He can see his grandmother from the kitchen, through her bedroom doorway. Prisoner of her dementia, the old woman lies fully clothed atop the chenille bedspread, her floral house dress faded, her shoes scuffed and worn, light from one window cutting her in two. Her good dishes have disappeared, the piano is still in the old farmhouse, the cows need to be milked, her young sons are still in France at war. The boy sits at the breakfast table, adrift in a sunlit swirl of dust motes. He understands none of this is true, but how is he to help? What can anyone say? To live is to leave, the boy thinks; we make our way, but lose something always and wherever we go. Our shoe soles wear down, our hair thins, our bodies diminish and so we travel always through galaxies of our own shed lint and skin, the leavings of once known things. Finally, at a loss, he just lies down next to her, his sneakers alongside her purpled ankles. He knows nothing ever is going to be all right, but he says it anyway.

Mark Cox

from Knowing, winner of the 2025 Brockman-Campbell Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society

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Mark Cox is chair of the Department of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. His six previous books include Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017) and Readiness (2018). Read more about Knowing and purchase your copy at Press 53 HERE.

Claudine Moreau is second place finalist for the 2025 Brockman-Campbell Award, for her book Demise of Pangaea. Visit this site on October 3 for more about her book and a sample poem.

Mark Cox

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Each September at its fall meeting the North Carolina Poetry Society features readings by the winners of the following contests:

Brockman-Campbell Book Award (NCPS): best book of poetry published by a North Carolina author in the preceding year

Lena Shull Manuscript Award (NCPS): for a manuscript by a North Carolina author; the winning book is published by NCPS

Susan Laughter Meyers Fellowship (NCPS): a one week residential fellowship at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities for one North or South Carolina poet

Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize (sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network): for an individual poem by a North Carolina author

Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Award (co-sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review at East Carolina University and NCPS): for an individual poem recited / performed

For information about North Carolina Poetry Society contests VISIT HERE:

In 2023 the September NCPS meeting was held at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh, in 2024 at the NC Arboretum in Asheville, and this year’s meeting on September 13 celebrated the Cary Arts Center, formerly the Cary High School (1939), listed on the national registry of historic places. Today’s and next Friday’s posts feature some of the poetry shared at the meeting by the 2025 contest winners; return to this site on October 3 for more offerings!

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The Meadow

++++ I woke in a tall-grass field at first light,

and listened to the birds, and hummed with a dream

++++ ++++ I made up from wisps

++++ that ran through my body

++++ ++++ shivering marrow, making me notice

++++ the dew that dampened

my face and the spider webs

++++ starting to shimmer the trees.

Everything was breathing; the long night echoed

++++ in the dawn-light: stars

++++ ++++ and vast migrations

++++ as the breeze stuttered a moment, then stilled.

++++ Across the field, my companion was singing

++++ ++++ her own perfect song, which was silence. Still

++++ ++++ ++++ I could hear her somehow, so I got up and set off

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ to thank her for sharing this beautiful place

++++ ++++ ++++ she’d known all her life, this place where she’d always

++++ ++++ ++++ ++++ felt happy, the place she yearned to stay

++++ ++++ as long as she breathed. And then, she’d told me,

++++ she’d turn into something more perfect: the vast

sky, so blue it hurt the eyes,

++++ or a meadow like this one, that stretched to the horizon.

Michael Hettich

from Waking Up Alone, winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Manuscript Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society, to be published later this year by Redhawk Publications.

Michael Hettich

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After years in New York, Colorado, Florida, and Vermont, Michael Hettich now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College where he was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. Over five decades he has published more than two dozen books of poetry and received numerous honors, including several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, and a Florida Book Award.

Additional Finalists for this year’s Lena Shull Award are Becky Nicole James and Charles Wheeler.

Michael Hettich

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Feathers

When September slips in the window like a forgotten lover,

Reaching for me from my burrow

+++++++++++++++++++++ With its hands of feathers

In the early morning croak of crows, and I can smell

That someone has lit a fire,

+++++++++++++++++++++ An utterance of feathers,

Such that I can’t remember if I’m seven, in a log house my father built,

And he’s kindled the first autumn fire,

+++++++++++++++++++++ Fanned the feathers,

Or I’m twenty-five in the wooded hollow alone

But for the cats, dogs, and calls of coyotes, having lit the fire myself

+++++++++++++++++++++ That spanned feathers,

But no, when you roll over

In a twist of sheets,

+++++++++++++++++++++ In a band of feathers,

And I hear a young tail thump softly on the floor, a brief whine-

When someone else’s woodsmoke slips through the window

+++++++++++++++++++++ Like sanded feathers,

And I am here with you, and we’ve struck our own match-

When you reach across and slip your arm around my waist,

+++++++++++++++++++++ With the sustenance of feathers-

Narya Rose Deckard

Narya Rose Deckard

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Narya Rose Deckard teaches writing at Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she earned her MFA in poetry at the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative. Originally from the mountains of Maryland, she currently lives in Valdese, NC with her husband, dog, five cats, and a few chickens, but she also spent ten years in Asheville studying literature and philosophy at UNCA. As winner of the 2025 Susan Laugher Meyers Fellowship, she receives an honorarium and one week writing residency in Southern Pines at Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Susan Laughter Meyers was a widely published Carolina poet who mentored many rising poets and promoted literature across the South for decades. She served at different times as president of both the South Carolina and North Carolina Poetry Societies. Her family, friends, students, and other admirers of her life’s work have endowed this Fellowship in her name for the North Carolina Poetry Society. Many thanks to Weymouth Center, as well, for donating space and support for the poet residency.

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Begin With Me

I got up

off the ground

near some graves—I share

the last name with.

I begin,

with what I was handed,

a mama, a daddy I saw a few times,

because he hid

in the hues he knew.

My little brother full of love

like the corner store in heaven. I knew

his lying like I knew our daddy’s lying,

same song, but a higher key.

My mama taught me to

ask my dead plenty of questions—

to let the moon touch me on the mouth,

to ring my black bell.

Tyree Daye

Tyree Daye

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Tyree Daye led the writing workshop for the afternoon session of this NCPS meeting, He focused on breath: within and around a poem; what it might reveal and what it might hide. The writer can strive to become more conscious of their own breath as they splice syllables and thump out the poem’s rhythm. The reader can strive to slow down and feel their own breath as they silently speak the words. Breath can hold the meaning and feeling that the poem wants to birth into the world. Hold it, and let it out.

Tyree Daye grew up in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of three poetry collections, including River Hymns (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize), Cardinal, and most recently a little bump in the earth. He has been a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. He serves as Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Tyree Daye teaches. Not just reading and writing, not just poetry – he teaches what it means to be human, a human with a past and with a future. One reaction to his new book: Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and “bringing back the dead.”

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Tune in next week, folks . . . in our October 3 post we will continue to celebrate the riches of this September 13 meeting in Cary with poetry by Claudine Moreau, Becky Nicole James, Charles Wheeler, and more.

Tyree Daye

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Joan Barasovska and Kathy Ackerman, Membership VP and NCPS Secretary

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Bad Time

Posted in poetry, Photography, family, tagged poetry, imagery, family, Bill Griffin, Bill Blackley, nature photography, David Duchovny, Carbon Canyon, About Time on September 12, 2025| 6 Comments »

[including Carbon Canyon by David Duchovny]

We cannot know how good for us

the bad times were.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . – High Five in the Sky –

Bill and I decide to take a walk together this autumn afternoon. The year is 2020. Does visceral memory plunge you into context? When did he and I last see each other, if only above the nasal hem of an N-95? But today we will be together outdoors, the light breeze adequate to disperse particulates as we pick our way along the steep trail down to Dutchman Creek below our homes. Near neighbors, nearly always separate in our daily meanderings. Today reconnecting. Today again confessing to each other that we are connected somewhere deep in our guts, spleen & pancreas, since that first day in 1979 when Bill introduced himself to me as my Senior Resident and I stepped onto the wards at Durham County General as an Intern.

That first night we stumbled on the brink of fucking up completely. One patient we had stabilized and put to bed crashed at 3 AM while we were looking elsewhere. We were able to bring her back and at 0600 coffee before rounds with the Attending we listed to each other all the things we’d just learned. Still learning now, forty-one years later, Bill on the bench I’ve planted on my hill and me on a rock six feet distant. We confess completely fucking up again, this time our friendship when we split ten years after that very first connection. Time is not calligraphy, an artful line advancing with curlicues that mark each pleasant memory. Time is a patchwork of craters where the bombs went off. Time may soften a few scars, allow fireweed and fleabane to bloom amidst the desecration, but be careful you don’t stumble at the lip of former chaos.

Or do stumble. Look up for once from always looking down. Pull up your sleeve and share the bruises. I’m talking to you, one Bill to another Bill. I am grateful to have you as my friend.

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Carbon Canyon

We lived in Carbon Canyon the, before the fire,

unpack that given irony – were there no

carbon copies, we so unique and blessed?

There was a time when I walked

with my three-year-old daughter

(I think three . . .).

Anyway, I know we were walking the deep decline

of Carbon Canyon

on one of those short, mommyless jaunts . . .

And we came upon

the recently car-crushed carcass

of a gray field mouse, part three-dimensional

as in life,

part flattened as in a drawing,

the weight of the car

having made its lower half unreal, a cartoon.

The drive long gone,

unaware of their handiwork, guiltless.

A tiny trickle of blood from its slightly opened

mouth, a last profound unheard utterance,

so perfectly dramatic and telling

as if to seem placed by a movie crew

hiding in the bushes perhaps.

And my daughter (two, three, four?)

about to spy it on the ground, and I, a daddy,

with knowledge spilling out of my pockets,

life lessons, sense a teaching moment for the disquisition

on mortality that very parent believes

every three-year-old needs –

(see, it all ends, best laid plans and all that,

life’s unfair; carpe diem, little one;

Latin for . . . heaven; there but for the grace of god –)

in these moments, I realize I am nothing but a recording

of my own parents’ voices – their greatest hits,

my soul their phonograph . . .

Fade in: a father slows his daughter, allowing

the chance to happen upon a dead mouse,

it/death knowledge. Consequence. Mortality.

But it is only now, as we kneel,

that I notice the vibrant cha-cha line of ants

dancing in and out of the ruined creature

in all their anarchic discipline,

carrying to and fro unseeable bits of meat

and nutrient mouse ooze.

And my breath catches

because suddenly this lesson is for Daddy,

and it is Daddy who cannot face too much death,

the death after death, my death

in this mouse’s mouth, my daughter’s death.

I’ve not quite stomach enough

to face the pieces of us all carried off into oblivion,

eaten till we are unrecognizable, digested,

shit. Roadkill.

Dizzying, I say, “Oh, let’s go sweetheart . . .”

But it’s too late – my daughter,

two or three or four, has seen

leans down farther, her blue eyes

in inch or two from the ground, and says,

“Daddy, look the ants, there’s so many of them.”

“Yes, I see. Maybe we should let the mouse sleep, let her

sleep.”

I take her hand to lead her, though I don’t know where.

I know I am blind and unprepared,

a child leading a child,

and the little one stops and smiles,

and points back to the carnage –

“No, the ants, Daddy, the ants – look how much they love

her.”

David Duchovny

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This morning, 6 Sept. 2025, I pick Bill up at his door for another walk. Before we get in the car he hands me a gift, a book, a book of poetry. Poetry, admit it, has been the gravity that brought Bill and me back to earth after we had orbited so far apart. Years of smoldering enmity smoke out when a friend made us sit down together in the sam room to read poetry, to write it, to share it with each other. Something as tenuous as spider silk can still contain the angry wasp – we did indeed think we were still intent on stinging each other until we discovered we weren’t. One line leads to another. Today Bill reaches out to give me David Duchovny’s book after he himself has read it, most pages heiroglyphed with his own lightly pencilled checkmarks and squiggled connectors. Which I will pay more attention to than the words themselves.

Time, I tell myself, is a crap teacher. I’m always ever looking backwards at the time I’ve mangled and wasted, misunderstood and misspent. If time is so instructive, why can’t I look forward and craft a hunk of time into the shape I hope it shall become? Now time has brought Bill himself across a health threshold from which there is, this time, no returning. We talk about it as we reach our trailhead; we live within its reality as we walk the trail. We reach our limit, turn around, walk back towards the car, and time keeps on arrowing in its singleminded direction. Here we stand in the mess and glory of autumn blooming. Some flowers, dying and dry, want their seeds to hitch a sticky ride on our pants; some pods pop as we brush by; some buds are just this day erupting. Time is not a thread. Time is a thousand threads, a billion-billion threads and all tangled and intertwined like this patch of hog peanut within the thicket of goldenrod. You can’t pick it apart but here and there you can find the flowers. Wherever our threads have crossed and re-crossed, Bill, I will keep learning to be grateful.

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David Duchovny is an actor, director, singer-songwriter, podcaster. About Time, his first full length poetry collection, follows four published novels and is available HERE.

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