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[with 3 poems by Bob Wickless]
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Not Wind, Not Water
+++++ In Memory of Rod Jellema
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I would study, if I could, not wind
Nor water, but the silence after wind,
The scattering after second motion
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On a darkened shore. Tests, if given,
Would consist of laying pages
End to end, the opening of endless
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Information, movements on the beach
At dawn. Neither light nor darkness overall,
But the space of intersection . . .
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The X between the film and camera
Where easy motion crosses over
One to the world. There I’d sit,
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X’ed out, oblivious, yet hugely intelligent.
Schools of fish would soon dismiss me,
Flotsam would pass, failures survive,
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But I, jetsam, drunk beyond knowledge,
Would float aimless, issuing assignments,
Collecting homework from the stars.
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Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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Not much to see here this time of year? But that’s exactly why we’ve come. While Linda and Margaret chase Bert down the wide camellia-lined promenades of the university garden, Josh and I take an inconspicuous side path. Not many folks meandering these narrow trails today. Winter-brown, bloomed-out, leaf-strewn: welcome to Native Plants.
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Meadow, borders, understory, they draw us right in. Just a month ago these pale bristles, fuzzballs, and tufts were brightly hued racemes, cymes, and corymbs. So inviting. Now begging for dispersal. I let my hand cup a stem and run up over the feathery head. I examine my palm – dozens of tiny seedlets, each with its stiff barbule. My, my — Josh just happens to have a sheaf of miniature brown envelopes in his shirt pocket. He hands me one and I dribble my catch into it. How many different species of goldenrod and aster? And we still have an entire little prairie to traverse.
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A month after last April’s tornado crossed our neighborhood, after the cherry picker and chainsaws had gone home, after the ‘dozer had pushed two-ton trunks and root balls to the edge of our property past the Duke Energy cut, I imagined that the bare clay and churned up leaf mold would wait for winter, barren, when I could sow the half-acre with something new. But this summer the exposed earth received something it had patiently waited decades for. Sunlight. This fall the slope is a jostling upright congregation of pilewort and poke, and knee deep in damnable invasive stilt grass.
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Best get to it. It’s a lot of square meters, but I have a fire rake and a 5-pound hazelhoe I use for trail workdays. And on the screened porch I have a bag of bags, cold stratifying, waiting for January and a smooth, raked bed: native silver plume grass, big bluestem, Indian grass my friend Joe gathered from his meadow on the Mitchell River; wingstem, crownbeard, ironweed I’ve been pulling during hikes along the MST; store-bought half-kilos of Southeast Wildflowers; and a little miniature brown envelope, stuffed full, and hand-labeled “Duke Mix.”
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Two Poems From School
1. Drawing Horses
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There was one slow girl from grade two
And three, unable to multiplicate, ill-
At-ease, and long to devise, who tried
But tired of her dull and daily work,
Turned the smudge of your yellow page off
And began to draw horses.
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Riderless, stream of those great manes back,
her horses rode out of no course but gladly off
The end of every page to the end of every class.
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And when that girl died in a white hospital
Kicked by no horse but the one deep inside
Galloping over her frail, fourth grade hide,
I though I would try drawing horses. But I,
I was no good.
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So girl, who never learned much from school
But taught me a daily grace in the movement
Of horses, these are for you.
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Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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When Bob Wickless signed my copy of The Secret Care the World Takes, he noted that while we have never met in person we share three things in common: poetry; North Carolina; the editorial generosity of Jack Kristofco at The Orchard Street Press. And a fourth thing – a year ago I featured Bob’s poem Prayer in Spring in another post extolling the wonders of native “weeds.”
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Bob is from Maryland and has “held many jobs” in his lifetime, but he wisely retired to Reidsville NC to reside in “the writingest state.” Secret Care takes seriously the creative task of reminding us of what we all share in common. Bob leads his characters by the hand, introduces them to us, places our hand in theirs and waits quietly while we gaze into each other’s eyes. That tender connection may be wistful, it may be sad, but there is also humor in these poems. Laughter. Joy.
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In the end may we become convinced that the World does care for us. Perhaps we may feel the tug to care also for the World and what it contains, what it nurtures, what it brings forth. Through the magic of poetry, this care is no longer secret.
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Check out The Orchard Street Press, its annual contest and anthology, Quiet Diamonds, and order Bob Wickless’s book HERE
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Solstice: The Children’s Ward
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The secret care the world takes
Has pressed closed all the petals
Of tiny summer flowers
As if darkness might infuse
Those dying colors
With some thing they did not mean,
Some statement thy did not possess,
Some dream they could never intend.
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It is in the same way rain,
Or even the thought of rain
Oncoming, turns up a maple’s leaves
Like fragile buckets –
Or a whole forest of maples,
A hundred, thousand, children’s hands
Raised in anticipation
Of the sky’s sweet promise.
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And it is evident, too, the easy way
You breathe, so effortlessly in sleep,
How your small, secret bodies know,
Always, exactly what is required
Of this world and the next
To simply sleep
A sleep simple enough
To trust all your flowers to love.
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Bob Wickless
from The Secret Care the World Takes, The Orchard Street Press, Gates Mills, OH, © 2023
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